Stetson, 2019

This grand pour painting is a recent work by the Swiss artist John M Armleder. On these four stretched and aligned canvases, Armleder poured paints and lacquers to achieve a gradient of colors evocative of the seascape and sunset. Subversive by nature, Armleder’s pour paintings serve as an epitome of the Fluxus tenet of weighting the creation process more than the final outcome of an artistic practice. Through displaying a set of influences and references that eludes the modernist vernacular and any form of classification, the work neither hides the strategy of its fabrication nor the significance of its own process. It further conjures a sense of time that is liberated from formal constraints, moral obligations, and the conventions of taste and style.

John M Armleder (born 1948 in Geneva), affiliated with the Fluxus movement and co-founder of the Swiss pendant Groupe Ecart in 1969, is perhaps best known to a wider audience for his radical ‘Furniture Sculptures’ made in the 1990s, affixing a chair, for instance, on monochrome painting. His polymorphic work encompasses performance, drawings, sculptures, and paintings, characterized by a sense of deep interconnectedness between life and art, often appropriating objects or quotes. Armleder lives and works in Geneva.

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