From a Star to a TUTU Olivier Mosset has been living in Tucson, Arizona since 1996; he was born in 1944 in Bern. Since the mid-1970s he has been a representative of so-called Radical Painting, an abstract-geometric conception of painting that made art history in 1977 with the exhibition Radical Painting in Williamstown, New York, which proved to be defining in terms of style. One of its ideals is to undermine artistic originality through objectivity and seriality. Starting point was the question of what painting actually is, and how it works. To this end, Olivier Mosset created a diverse oeuvre of monochrome as well as abstract-geometric works, suppressing any mystifying attribution of meaning. The exhibition and book exemplify this and offer a varied overview of Olivier Mosset’s work, from the black circular rings to the two-tone stripe paintings, and the stars and monochrome canvases, which in their execution are devoid of any distinct individual characteristics. In 1962, Olivier Mosset began his artistic career in Paris as an assistant to Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri. He then met Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni and together, in four provocative collaborative actions from January to September 1967, they attacked Abstract Expressionism and thus the Nouvelle Ecole de Paris head-on. They called themselves BMPT, after the initial letters of their names, but soon dissolved the group. They strived to fundamentally question the prevailing notion painting, starting from scratch to formulate a conception of painting that referred only to itself. In 1968, Olivier Mosset became a member of the Paris group Vive la Revolution ; in the 1970s he repeatedly visited New York where he met Andy Warhol and studied the work of Robert Ryman. Mosset’s oeuvre has come full-circle in a way with more recent works, such as the eponymous TUTU from 2013, a play on words that refers to a drawing by another artist–a ballerina by Marcel Duchamp.
Exhibition: Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zurich, 2019/5/30-2019/9/9
