John Armleder: Soubresauts: Geneva

For John M. Armleder’s first commercial exhibition in Geneva in a decade, Olivier Varenne and Balthazar Lovay will present the artist’s work spread between their two galleries. The show focuses on rarely-seen-before works on paper and sculptures, spanning from the 1960s to today. 

All of the works are small-scale and intimate, and important for bearing witness to Armleder's early exploratory research, his inexhaustible desire for experimentation and varied production, and for presaging his recent large-scale paintings and installations.

OLIVIER VARENNE ART MODERNE & CONTEMPORAIN 

This show will feature a selection of drawings, gouaches and collages that form a panorama of notes and traces throughout the artist's life, from 1963 to 2023.  It will build on two previous museum exhibitions of drawings: 891 and other pieces (Kunstmuseum Basel, 1980) and About Nothing (Kunsthalle Zürich, 2004) and highlight Armleder’s experimental approach to art.  

The works will draw focus to key concepts and moments in the artist’s career. Chance and spontaneity resonate with the artist’s interest in Expressionism and Abstraction – played out notably in watercolour and ink works of the 1960s often made in the morning and inspired by historical abstraction by artists such as Klee, Malevich, Kandinsky.  Armleder’s Furniture Sculptures which explored his observations on functionality and aesthetics is anticipated in an early ink on paper Batteur from 1963.  And Minimalism and the ‘void’ reflecting his engagement with the idea that the void is an active space of potential is revealed in Sans Titre, 1978. The rich selection will emphasise Armleder’s distinctive interdisciplinary approach which challenges all forms of convention classification and reflect his voracious appetite for questioning the very nature of art.

LOVAY FINE ARTS

The two groups of works shown at Lovay Fine Arts reflect on the strategies of chance and indeterminacy John Armleder developed early on in his practice. In this exhibition, all these works are created from his collections of found objects.

The seven boxes (a series of six wall-mounted glass boxes, and one individual on a pedestal) were created in homage to two artists important to Armleder at this period: Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) for the box system, and Georges Brecht (1926-2008) for the chance-based work. All these boxes are made from found, collected or purchased objects. They generate small and autonomous universes, like little experiments in composition.

The 6 wall-mounted boxes, Sans Titre, 1974, shown at Galerie Gaetan in 1974, feature a mix of objects both glued and unglued always bringing a new composition, whilst in Wanderer Fantasy, 1977 (displayed on a pedestal and shown at exhibition date?,) the objects move freely within their container, generating an unexpected composition each time the box is opened.

The second group consists of six time-defying collages. In the 1960s Armleder collected playing cards during his urban derives, which he has kept ever since. In the summer of 2024 he made use of these cards to create the collages on show – in keeping with one of the artist’s most important commitments: not to separate his series by period but to continue them throughout his career.