Olivier MossetTUTU

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 conception of painting that made art history in 1977 with the style-defining exhibition “Radical Painting” in Williamstown, New York. One of its ideals is to undermine artistic originality through objectivity and seriality. The point of departure was the question of what painting is and how it works. In response to this question Olivier Mosset has created a diverse oeuvre of monochrome and abstract-geometric works that elude any mystifying attribution of meaning. Exhibition and book demonstrate this in exemplary fashion and offer a wide-ranging survey of Olivier Mosset’s work – from the black rings and the two-colour stripe paintings to the stars and the monochrome canvases, which are executed without any individual handwriting. Olivier Mosset had begun 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, between January and September 1967, he mounted a frontal attack on Abstract Expressionism, and thus on the Nouvelle École de Paris, in four provocative joint actions. They called themselves BMPT after their initials, but soon dissolved the group again. They wanted to question prevailing painting fundamentally, to begin at zero, to formulate a painting that refers only to itself. In 1968 Olivier Mosset became a member of the Paris group “Vive la Révolution”; in the 1970s he was repeatedly drawn to New York, where he met Andy Warhol and engaged intensively with the work of Robert Ryman. The circle is closed by more recent works such as “TUTU” of 2013, which gives the book its title – a play on words referring to a drawing by another artist: a ballerina by Marcel Duchamp.

Exhibition:
Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zürich, 30/5 – 9/9/2019