OLIVIER MOSSET ++
«LEAVING THE MUSEUM»
21 APRIL–17 JUNE 2012

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 Olivier 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, leaving all attribution of meaning in its work open. Mosset became known for his circle paintings during this period. By 1974 he had painted 200 of these works, all 100 x 100 cm, in oil or acrylic on canvas and 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. Serge Bard’s film Fun and Games for Everyone was made at an opening of an exhibition of Mosset’s circle paintings in 1968. In the film, the coming and going of the visitors becomes a psychedelic improvised game, in which the light makes the faces of the visitors appear completely expressionless and transforms them into graphical surfaces, which disappear into Mosset’s paintings through the formal interplay of sharpness and blur and become paintings in themselves. “I had nothing to do with the film, it was just filmed at my exhibition.” (Olivier Mosset)

Mosset also 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 by associating two initially neutral and then more intensive colours. 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 which is completely devoid of painterly gesture. 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 which can be located in the Neo-Geo movement – a style characterised by a geometrical, abstract and formalistic visual idiom. Since the 1990s, Mosset has been producing “shaped canvases” – canvases which take the shape of stars, letters and dollar signs or refer to the circle motif of his early works and hence question the traditional rectangular format.

Kunsthalle Zurich thanks:
Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Luma Foundation, Hulda und Gustav Zumsteg-Stiftung