Olivier Mosset: TUTU

From star to TUTU

Olivier Mosset has lived in Tucson, Arizona, since 1996. He was born in Bern in 1944. Since the mid-1970s, he has been regarded as a representative of so-called Radical Painting, an abstract-geometric approach to painting that made art history in 1977 with the style-defining exhibition "Radical Painting" in Williamstown, New York. One of its ideals was to undermine artistic originality through objectivity and seriality. The starting point was the question of what painting is and how it works. Olivier Mosset has created a diverse oeuvre of monochrome and abstract-geometric works on this question, which defy any mystifying attribution of meaning. The exhibition and book demonstrate this in an exemplary manner and offer a diverse overview of Olivier Mosset's oeuvre - from the black circular rings to the two-coloured stripe paintings to the stars and monochrome canvases, which are executed without any individual style. Olivier Mosset began his artistic career in Paris in 1962 as an assistant to Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri. There he met Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni, with whom he attacked Abstract Expressionism and thus the Nouvelle École de Paris head-on in four provocative joint actions between January and September 1967. They called themselves BMPT after their initials, but quickly disbanded the group. They wanted to fundamentally question the prevailing style of painting, to start from scratch, to formulate a style of painting that referred only to itself. In 1968, Olivier Mosset became a member of the Parisian group "Vive la Révolution", and in the 1970s he was repeatedly drawn to New York, where he met Andy Warhol and intensively studied the work of Robert Ryman. More recent works such as the eponymous "TUTU" from 2013, a play on words that refers to another artist's drawing - a ballerina by Marcel Duchamp, complete the arc.

Exhibition:
Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zurich, 30/5 - 9/9/2019