John Armleder (b. 1948, Geneva, Switzerland) has developed one of the most expansive artistic practices of the postwar period. For more than five decades, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, publishing, exhibition-making and design have formed the components of a continuous investigation into the ways artworks generate meaning through their encounter with objects, spaces and viewers. Every project reorganizes a field of relationships in which perception, context and display participate equally in the construction of the work. Throughout this sustained practice, the exhibition emerges as an artistic medium in its own right: a dynamic environment where visual languages, historical references and material forms circulate freely, continually renewing the conditions through which art is experienced.
This conception of artistic practice took shape in Geneva at the end of the 1960s, when Armleder co-founded the Groupe Ecart with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner. Conceived simultaneously as an artists’ collective, gallery, publishing house, bookshop and experimental platform, Ecart established an ecology in which creation, dissemination and discussion belonged to a single cultural activity.