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The exhibition Olivier Mosset ++ Leaving the Museum is the
final project to be staged by the Kunsthalle Zürich at its temporary
home in the Museum Bärengasse before it returns to its renovated and
extended premises at the Löwenbräu art complex. Over the past
year and a half, wide-ranging encounters with contemporary art have taken
place in the houses of the Museum Bärengasse, which were built in 1670
and feature tiled stoves, decorative stucco work, and wood panelling. We
have now come full circle with this last exhibition by Olivier Mosset (born
in Bern in 1944, lives and works in Tucson, Arizona), which is staged in 16
rooms of the Museum Bärengasse and presents a range of works, which
have been integrated into the features of the space. Leaving the
Museum combines a large selection of Mosset's paintings with works
created in collaboration with other artists, works which arose in his
circle and works inspired by him. Olivier Mosset approaches the Museum
Bärengasse's numerous individual rooms as individual exhibitions in
themselves, which together provide an insight into his wide-ranging
œuvre and artistic practice.
Olivier Mosset left
Switzerland as a young man and settled in Paris. He worked as an assistant
for Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri, and together with Daniel Buren,
Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni established the BMPT group in the
mid-1960s. The group, which explored the essence of painting and undermined
traditional institutional structures, raised questions about authorship and
originality. Mosset became known for his circle paintings during this
period. By 1974 he had painted 200 of these works, all showing an identical
black circular ring on a white background. This repetition and limitation
to a single, simple motif reduced the manifestness of painterly practice
and the individual artistic effort to a lowest common denominator. He
continued his interrogation of traditional ideas in the stripe paintings
which he produced from 1972, and which—inspired by Buren's stripe
motifs—opened up a literal field of experience. This led to a radical
reduction to monochrome in 1977 and saw Mosset become an important
proponent of Radical Painting. Mosset's painting is always based on the
material reality of the work: dimension, format, ground, colour and the
uniform application of the paint. The central focus of Mosset's work is the
exploration of what painting is and how an artist must paint so that
painting functions exclusively as such, without being systematically
programmed or dictated by chance. Painting is colour and colour alone. In
the 1980s, Mosset produced two-coloured abstract paintings and since the
1990s, Mosset has been producing "shaped canvases."
Mosset is
an "easy rider." His rejection of the norms of painting finds analogous
expression in the vast expanses of unspoiled landscape found in his adopted
home of Arizona and his love of motorbikes that often feature in his art
and presentations—for example one of his motorbikes, a 1950s
"Vincent," appears in a curious presentation in one of the small rooms on
the top floor of the Museum Bärengasse. The motorbike rhetoric is
reflected in the delicate irony of the folk-rock songs of Al Perry, in the
work Run by Christina Da Silva, in Mosset's video Last Run at
Montriond 14 (2004) as well as in the road movie T.S.O.Y.W
(2007) by Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler that are all included in
the exhibition.
Collaboration with other artists has been a
feature of Mosset's artistic activity from the outset. He has worked with
artists like Parrino, John Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, and Andy Warhol. In
1985, the latter signed a yellow square painted by Mosset in 1979. The work
of the American artist Michael Zahn (born in 1963, lives and works in
Brooklyn), which is presented in the exhibition, also adopts this concept:
Mosset recently signed a work by Zahn who combines minimalism and the
American cult of the superficial in his art, transforming the binary codes
of computer language into painting.
Kunsthalle
Zürich thanks: Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Luma
Foundation, and Hulda und Gustav Zumsteg-Stiftung.
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