John M. Armleder

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

life and work

John Michael Armleder comes from a Geneva hotelier family. His great-grandfather Richard Rodolphe Armleder founded the Geneva luxury hotel Le Richemond in 1875 , where John Michael Armleder spent his youth. In the mid-1960s he had his first public appearances as a musician and with happenings that were influenced by the music of John Cage . From 1966 to 1967 he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and was involved in Fluxus campaigns . In 1969 he attended the Glamorgan Summer School in Wales / Great Britain. In the same year he founded the Fluxus group Groupe Ecart together with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, with whom he had been friends since childhood . The group members produced numerous Super 8 films , among other things . The Ecart gallery , which existed from 1973 to 1980 and hosted exhibitions and performances by Joseph Beuys , John Cage and Andy Warhol in Geneva, emerged from the Groupe Ecart . In 1978 and 1979 Armleder received the Federal Art Scholarship . At the end of the 1970s, he moved away from the Fluxus movement and began to paint reduced, two-dimensional, minimalist- oriented pictures, using not only the classic canvas , but also perforated panels and old pieces of furniture as a painting base. Quoting art history, he painted abstract pictures which he combined with used home furnishings in room installations and which did not escape kitsch.

In the 1980s Armleder developed the Furniture Sculptures , which took up questions of the ready-made . In 1987 the artist bought a wall shelf from a used furniture dealer on which more than twenty-five used chairs were displayed. He brought shelves and chairs to a neighboring gallery, where they were then presented in an exhibition as FS 172 . He bought three upright rolls of carpet ( FS 234 ) in 1990 as remnants from a shop and took Sylvie Fleury at her word when she pointed out that the carpet cylinders looked like objects for an exhibition. According to the artist, his first work, which he neither produced nor had the idea for it. " Here, as in his other works, he “staged a constant interplay, between art and life, between high and low, between irony and pathos . An exciting game with associations and art history that does not deny its proximity to the aesthetics of Dada and Fluxus to this day. "

In 2005 he arranged stuffed forest animals, running TV sets, mirrors, bouquets of flowers, Christmas trees, logs, flashing LCD lamps and animal skins for gallery-filling environments in the Tate Gallery , Liverpool , and grouped them into irritating room installations. For the Flash object . Flash. Flash. , 2004 height 461 × depth 600 × length 520 cm, exhibited in 2005 at the Center for Art and Media Technology , Karlsruhe, he used five light trees, glow sticks, LEDs, metal, plastic, cables and transformers for a spatial sculpture and had the light sequence programmed.

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

In 2019 there was a solo exhibition by John Armleder in the Frankfurt Kunsthalle Schirn , in which the sentence I do nothing other than what others have already done was written on the wall at the staircase of his exhibition to reflect his concept of a special kind of interior design clarify. With his installations, he first deconstructs his surroundings and thus dismantles past art forms. Armleder's exhibition focuses on the authenticity of exhibits, the priority of visual overwhelming and the depth of the surface.

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

  • John M. Armleder. (Exhibition catalog). Texts by Maurice Besset, Suzanne Page, Dieter Schwarz. Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1987.
  • Margrit Brehm. John Armleder: At Any Speed. With articles 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 essays by John Armleder, Claude Ritschards. Rath Museum, Geneva 1990.
  • Adolf Krischanitzh: To Choose, work 1969–1992. With essays by John Armleder, Derek Barley. Vienna Secession, 1993.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Press release Galerie Caratsch
  2. Art Prize Nord-LB: https://www.nordlb.de/John-M-Armleder.2160.0.html?&=&no_cache=1&print=1 (link not available since 2012 and not archived)
  3. ^ Tate Gallery, Liverpool
  4. ^ ZKM, Karlsruhe
  5. Time
  6. discogs.com
  7. Rose-Maria Gropp: John M Armleder in the Schirn: Everything is real, everything is false . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed July 4, 2020]).
  8. JOHN M ARMLEDER. CA.CA.