John Armleder and Olivier Mosset

This spring, conceptual artists John Armleder and Olivier Mosset take over the galleries at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Strongly influential for a younger generation of artists working in the U.S. and in Europe, Armleder’s and Mosset’s work remains unfamiliar to a wider American audience.

The inaugural show of the Contemporary’s new curatorial team signals a commitment to artist-centered exhibitions. Jointly conceived by the artists—who have been close for more than twenty years—the exhibition represents neither a curated two-person show nor two independent solo exhibitions. Instead, it proposes an active juxtaposition of parallel and opposite artistic approaches where artworks act as obstacles, and obstacles act as artworks. Armleder contributes new pour and pattern paintings, a site-specific fifty-foot wall-painting, an installation of Mylar Christmas trees, and strips of metallic vinyl. Mosset, in addition to a series of his infamous “circle paintings” from the late 1960s and early 1970s, presents a large-scale installation of several dozen Toblerones, large cardboard sculptures based on anti-tank structures used by the Swiss army.

John Armleder has produced thousands of sculptures, paintings, drawings, books, and performances, creating an art of impenetrable surfaces that collapses the unique into the generic, and vice-versa. Olivier Mosset, on the other hand, chooses to remain firmly committed to blankness, stripping art of any content, and pursuing a decelerated process, rejecting our conventional notions of progress and insatiable hunger for the new.

John Armleder and Olivier Mosset
curator: Anthony Huberman