John Armleder

Galerie Andrea Caratsch 

Acquired from the above in 2013 by the present owner

Channeling the dual energies of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting, Swiss artist John Armleder paints with a light-hearted appreciation for the innate visual interest of his materials. Employing a process-based approach similar to that of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Larry Poons, Armleder and his Pour Painting series are refreshingly random. As described by French curator and critic Stéphanie Moisdon: "These works, born from his admiration for Larry Poons, and in accord with Armleder's larger practice, do not hide the strategy of their fabrication nor the significance of their own process: conjuring a time liberated from formal constraints, moral obligations, and the conventions of taste and style.” (Stephanie Moisdon, “La Bruche du Haricot,” Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels, 2015). 

Executed in 2008, Epilobium Albiflorum is a striking example of the streaming veils of color and texture that define the Pour Painting series. By painting directly onto his large-scale vertically oriented canvas, Armleder allows the poured material to flow down organically, producing a succession of diaphanous, gravity-pulled bands of saturated color. In questioning the very nature of modern art making in his practice, John Armleder connotes that the intentions of the artist are an open quantity through which the materials enact their own improvised dance. As perfectly summated by David Kordansky Gallery, “the Pour Paintings make plain that what we see is always dependent on the randomness of the encounter between our eyes, our minds, and the changing conditions of the world.”