John Armleder

John M. Armleder (* June 24, 1948 in Geneva ) is a Swiss conceptual artist, performance and object artist, painter, sculptor and art critic. He developed minimal interventions as well as space-filling installations.

Life and work

John Armleder Michael comes from a family of hoteliers Geneva. His great-grandfather Richard Rodolphe Armleder founded in 1875, the Geneva luxury hotel Le Richemond, where John spent his youth. Mid-1960s, he had his first public appearances as a musician and happenings that were influenced by the music of John Cage. From 1966 to 1967 he studied at the Ecole des Beaux -Arts in Geneva and participated in Fluxus actions. In 1969 he visited the Glamorgan Summer School in Wales / UK. In the same year he founded together with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, with whom he had been friends since childhood, the Fluxus " Groupe Ecart ". The group members produced, among others, numerous Super -8 films. From the " Groupe Ecart " which, from 1973 to 1980 showed existing, " Gallery Ecart ", the exhibitions and performances held in Geneva from, among others, Joseph Beuys, John Cage and Andy Warhol. In 1978 and 1979 he was awarded the Federal Art Scholarship. In the late 1970s he moved away from the Fluxus movement and began reduced to paint surface, oriented on minimalism pictures, in which he used not only the classic canvas, but also well plates and old furniture pieces to paint on. He painted, citing the history of art, abstract pictures, which he used with apartment facilities combined in installations and the kitsch not evaded.

In the 1980s, Armleder developed the " Furniture Sculptures ", took up the questions of the ready-made. 1987 bought by the artist in an antique dealer a wall shelf on which more than twenty-five cars chairs were issued. Shelf and chairs he brought in an adjacent gallery, where they were then presented as a working FS 172 in an exhibition. Three upright carpet rolls (FS 234), he acquired in 1990 as a remnant from a shop and took " Sylvie Fleury at his word, when she pointed out to him that the carpet looked like cylinder objects for an exhibition. According to the artist, his first work, he had neither produced nor to the idea. " Here, as in his other works he has created " a constant interplay in scene, between art and life, between high and low, between irony and pathos. An exciting game with associations and art history, does not deny its proximity to the aesthetics of Dada and Fluxus to this day. "

For gallery -filling environments in the Tate Gallery, Liverpool in 2005, he arranged stuffed forest animals, runny televisions, mirrors, bouquets, Christmas trees, wooden scabbard, flashing LCD lights and animal hides and grouped them irritating installations. For the object Flash. Flash. 461 × depth 600 × length 520 cm, exhibited in 2005 at the Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, he sat for a sculpture in space five light trees, light sticks, LEDs, metal, plastic, cables and transformers, and let program Flash., 2004 height, the light sequence.

He teaches at the Ecole Cantonal d'art ( ECAL ) in Lausanne and has been since 1995 a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Braunschweig. From 1992 to 2000 he was a member of the Swiss Federal Art Commission. Armleder lives in New York and in Geneva. Since 1990 he has lived with the artist Sylvie Fleury at Villa Magica, an old town house on the outskirts of Geneva. Fleury was 1990 Armleder's assistant, she came through him to art. In 2004 he founded with Sylvie Fleury and his son Stephane Armleder ( b. 1977 ), the Geneva record label Villa Magica Records. Stéphane (aka John B. Rambo aka The Genevan Heathen ) is the artistic director and also for the distribution of the label Record Company Records of Roxbury, Massachusetts ( USA), responsible. Both labels bring out such items as CDs and LPs by John Armleder and Sylvie Fleury, of Rockenschaub and John B. Rambo.

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 2005: ZKM Karlsruhe
  • 2000: Museum of Modern Art, New York, Open Ends
  • 1991: Metropolis, Berlin; Biennale in Lyon
  • 1987: Documenta 8, Kassel
  • 1986 Venice Biennale ( Swiss Pavilion ); Prospectus, Frankfurt am Main;

Literature (selection )

  • John M. Armleder. ( Exhibition catalog). Texts by Maurice Besset, Suzanne Page, Dieter Schwarz, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1987.
  • Margrit Brehm. John Armleder: At Any Speed ​​. ( with contributions by Axel Heil ). Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern -Ruit, 1999.
  • Ellen de Bruijne, John M Armleder: Pour Paintings 1982-1992. Centraal Museum, Utrecht 1992.
  • Charles Goerg, John M Armleder: Furniture Sculpture 1980-1990. ( with contributions by John Armleder, Claude Ritschards ), Musée Rath, Geneva, 1990.
  • Adolf Krischanitzh: To Choose, working from 1969 to 1992. ( with contributions by John Armleder, Derek Barley ) Vienna Secession, 1993.
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