16/10/2006
John M Armleder
Mamco, Geneve
Amor vacui, horror vacui
Amor vacui, horror vacui
This autumn Mamco, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Geneva, will be making quite
a splash by handing over nearly all of its exhibition space to the artist John M Armleder. Amor vacui,
horror vacui, 1968 - 2006 will be the most important monographic show devoted to the Geneva artist
to date and a unique opportunity to grasp his work in its entirety.
A first at Mamco
To conclude his vast cycle Mille et trois plateaux, Mamco has given carte blanche to one of the most influential
Swiss artists of the contemporary art scene, John M Armleder (Geneva, 1948), turning over to him three-quar-
ters of its exhibition space, some thirty galleries in all. Never before has the museum allowed a single artist to
command such a place within its wall. The choice of this exceptional presence is in keeping with the special
attention Mamco has always accorded Armleder, whose regular interventions at the museum since its opening
are pushed to their logical outcome in this major show. Amor vacui, horror vacui will cover a large spectrum
of the artist’s output, with some one hundred pieces from a range of periods along with several new works.
Paintings, sculptures, painted walls, drawings, installations, photographs, performances, films and documents
will occupy the majority of the museum.
Thirty years of a multifaceted output
The show pays homage to thirty years of Armleder’s multifaceted artistic practice. Close to the Fluxus mo-
vement, Armleder, together with several other artists, first founded in Geneva the group Ecart (1969- 1982),
which proved to be one of the most important alternative venues in Europe in the 1970s, featuring performan-
ces and exhibitions as well as artists’ publications in the form of multiples or books. From these multidirectional
collective experiences, Armleder developed the idea of an absence of hierarchy among genres and an attitude
of distancing with respect to the work of art while making no secret of his taste for the decorative and the or-
namental.
In the 1980s, Armleder shifted his work towards a reflection on abstraction through the use of appropriation and
quotation. This was the period of the Furniture Sculptures, hybrid constructions made up of furniture—pieces
of furniture, chairs, sofas, tables—mixed with paintings that drew on references to abstract art.
The elegant geometry of the works from the 1980s then gave way to pieces that lost some of their formalism,
like his accumulations of found materials, or his monumental installations of disparate objects. For fifteen years
now, Armleder has viewed the exhibition as a medium in its own right, playing with the saturation of space, the
collapse of genres, and the confusion between abstraction, figurative, and ornamental.
The show’s title is a nod in the direction of the artist’s method. Amor vacui, horror vacui, or the dialectic of full
and empty, overload and evacuation, a tension with which an exhibition plays constantly.
A great piece of nougat
In order to “break down the rigid effect of a retrospective," Armleder has chosen to display his pieces in a
nonlinear way, like a “great piece of nougat," as the artist put it not without a touch of flippancy and irony. To
introduce this grand mosaic, Armleder begins by sewing confusion on the museum’s fourth floor, proposing a
great classic exhibition that would be “like one devoted to somebody else" with a traditional, tre's museological
presentation of his pieces. Continuing with his investigation of the notion of exhibition, Armleder is creating on
Mamco’s three other floors specific environments for displaying his works there. In several galleries, the walls
are decorated with large-format murals or dressed with different materials such as cotton padding, mirrors,
satin or acetate, on which the artist is to hang his pieces.
“In the classic view of hanging works," explains the artist, “everything is done so that nothing disturbs the visi-
tor. The paintings are placed next to one another to spark a stimulating dialog between them. And indeed,
hanging paintings on a mural featuring a jellyfish motif disrupts the connections. A kind of vertical millefeuille is
created. This gesture isn’t aggressive since the proposal is never definitive. It creates accidents of perception
that are a positive thing for the event, the viewer, and very likely the paintings and their history."
Armleder is also presenting a new version of Everything (2005), his vast installation that is made up of an impo-
sing structure of scaffolding and a multitude of juxtaposed objects that include plants, minerals, stuffed animals,
television screens showing videos and other works that were once independent pieces. Brought together in
this way, these elements raise the question of possible equivalences among them and hence the difficulty of
separating the true from the false, the living from the dead, the work of art from the setting.
Amor vacui, horror vacui dedicates a significant part of its presentation to new works, notably a gallery lined
with neon lights that the artist has designed specifically for this occasion. And there are several thematic gal-
leries to complete the show with a room devoted to photographs, another to drawings, and a third to archival
materials, which the Director of Geneva’s Cabinet des estampes, Christophe Cherix, has put together for the
Mamco.
Collections displayed by the artist
Finally, Mamco has given the artist a free hand to display the museum’s collections. These few galleries are
the latest avatar of a series of proposals Armleder has done for Mamco in the Suite Genevoise, three galleries
hung by the artist on several earlier occasions. The guiding principle here was to bring together his own works
with pieces from the museum collections or by guest artists in order to provoke novel encounters and show
that beyond stylistic differences, contradictory or hierarchic connections between works don’t necessarily exist.
Press conference, Tuesday 17 October 2006 at 11 a.m. - Opening, Tuesday 17 October 2006, 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Mamco
10, rue des Vieux Grenadiers - Geneve
Hours: Thuesday to Friday 12 a.m. - 6 p.m. - Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. Closed on mondays and 24, 25, 26, 31 December 2006 and 1rst January 2007