Site-specific installations, appropriated ready-mades, paint splashes, and geometrical constructivist painting describe Armleder's allusions to diverse movements of modern art. He refers to their central ideas and argues strictly in favor of the principle of using images and objects within and outside the artistic context as freely available material.
Too Much is not Enough
John Armleder (born 1954) is one of the most important and influential Swiss
artists of the present day. He deals with art itself by means of his
wide-ranging stylistic and formulaic vocabulary, thereby creating an
inimitable universe of diverse and impressive works that vary between the
fields of art, design, concept, geometry, Pop, and Trash. Well-known due his
many international exhibitions such as at the Venice Biennale and in the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, Armleder, who has been a professor at the
HBK Braunschweig since 1994, constantly re-asks the questions about what art
is, and what art can do and what art is allowed.
Site-specific installations, appropriated ready-mades, paint splashes, and
geometrical constructivist painting describe Armleder's allusions to diverse
movements of modern art. He consistently refers to their central ideas and
argues strictly in favor of the principle of using images and objects within
and outside the artistic context as freely available material.
John Armleder will show a complex group of works in the Kunstverein Hannover
in which he cross-references pieces from the most diverse phases of his
career in rooms covered entirely by his wall paintings for the first time,
including works created or newly re-staged expressly for Hannover. Several
examples of the emblematic Furniture Sculptures (such as "Untitled (FS)",
1997) will be on show that combine industrially manufactured pieces of
furniture with geometric painting. In the tradition of Duchamp, Armleder
shifts everyday items into an artistic context, a process in which he
questions the concept of art as well as the concept of an individual
artistic authorship. In the Kunstverein Hannover, the curators will assemble
the piece "Ne Dites pas Non! (1996/2000), in which art and design furniture
produce an installative spatial image, according to his instructions.
New pieces in which Armleder works with neon lights, mirrors, flowers,
Korean light trees, projections and reflecting discotheque lights play a
central role in the exhibition. In addition, nine large-format Puddle
Paintings made in 2005 will be shown. These are based on the Pour Paintings
from the 1980s that are characterized by a free gestural style in which
paint and lacquer are experimentally mixed on the canvas. These processual
paintings differ greatly from the strict geometrical abstractions and
decorative elements on monochromatic backgrounds, for example the Wall
Paintings, which were also produced during the 1980s. Especially these wall
paintings, which will extend over all the rooms of the Kunstverein and
thereby serving as the backdrop of the entire exhibition, cross the
boundaries between free and applied arts, design, decorations, and
site-specific installations.
In "Asymcymetes' and "Mondo-Tiki Radiolaria" (2005), John Armleder will
restage a previously existing work to create a new installation that has
never been seen before in this form. On over-sized shelves one can find a
wide-ranging, extravagant assembly of colorfully shimmering plastic
elements, video monitors, real and artificial flowers, shiny trinkets,
fluorescent lights, ghetto blasters, Plexiglas, soft toys, as well as his
own works. With this connection of things, Armleder succeeds in a creating a
lightness with a clearly recognizable proximity to Dada and Fluxus. With the
combination of ready-mades and abstraction, Armleder formulates the
possibility of understanding art as the reevaluation of cultural values: He
ironically mixes art and the everyday, allows the trivial to shine
brilliantly, and offers it in front of a gaudily colored and strict
geometrical background: Too Much is not Enough.
Opening: November 24, 8 p.m.
Kunstverein Hannover
Sophienstrasse 2 - Hannover