(Geneva 1948–lives and works in Geneva)

CYLINDER. 2021.

Spray colour, oil and synthetic paint on canvas.

Signed, dated and titled on the overlap: CYLINDER 2021 John Armleder.

65.5 × 65.5 cm.

John Michael Armleder is one of the most influential contemporary European conceptual and action artists. His unusual and at the same time innovative work is highly recognisable today. His wide-ranging oeuvre, based on the abstract formal vocabulary of modernism, includes painting, drawing, multiples, sculptures, installations, videos and performance. He is known for his resistance to any labelling and rejects the idea that he and his art can be categorised. This results in an intermedia art that is constantly in fluid transition with design and architecture, as well as pop, high culture and everyday culture.

The two paintings presented here, Untitled from 1989 (lot 3449) and Cylinder from 2021 (lot 3455), could not be more different. The use of colours, the compositions, and the approach he takes are completely contrasting, yet the artist has maintained these two different series of works throughout the past decades. The common thread, that Armleder's art seeks to put into perspective the depth of the surface, is evident in both works:

The 1989 work reflects Armleder's neominimalism, also known as neo-geometry (neo-geo). In the wake of Op-Art and geometric abstraction, artists of the neo-geo current sought an updated, amorphous form of previously familiar abstract imagery. Ten green parallel lines are arranged on the large-format white background. The reduced, simple geometric motif is reminiscent of ornamental forms from the histories of decorative art or architecture. The precise, elongated lines have both a decorative and a meditative character and are sufficient in themselves.

On the other hand, the work "Cylinder" belongs to the ongoing series "Pour-Painting", which John Armleder had already discovered for himself in the 1980s, in which the central concern is the refusal of the concrete and the definite, as well as the search for process. He pours pots of colourful acrylic, oil, varnish or enamel over a white canvas and dusts certain surfaces that have not yet dried with glitter particles or pigment powder. Here the playful, the inclusion of chance, the subversive and the unplanned are sought, which are ultimately the essential elements of the artist's understanding of art.