Skip navigation.
POMERANZ COLLECTION

JOHN M. ARMLEDER

Painting G
2005
Mixed media on unprimed canvas
100 x 100 cm
Inv. Nr. 44

Born in 1948 in Geneva, Switzerland
Lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland and New York City,
New York, USA

The work of John M. Armleder is polymorphous. It is not identifiable with any medium, procedure, formal style, or visual or aesthetic world. It takes on a myriad of guises, repeats itself and undergoes a metamorphosis, only ever developing according to the circumstances. After being part of the alternative movement Fluxus with the Ecart Performance Group, founded in 1969 with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, Armleder has been questioning abstraction and the idea of modernity through the methods of appropriation and quotation since the early eighties. Beyond drawing, performance and painting, the artist has developed a practice in his installations where found objects are mixed with geometric or monochrome abstract paintings. The paintings become part of the woodwork, while pieces of furniture combined with paintings are transformed into pictorial structures and supports. This series of works begun in 1979 and entitled Furniture Sculpture criticizes the idea of style and also casts an ironic and distanced glance on the academism of abstraction. One can see the furniture as a metaphor of the canvas and the frame, humorously echoing the thoughts of the French movement “Supports/Surfaces”.