On the occasion of Frieze New York, Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of paintings by artists John M Armleder, Mark Hagen, Peter Halley and Olivier Mosset.
Founder of the Ecart Group and close to Fluxus, John M Armleder has since the end of the 1960s created a polymorphic body of work which encompasses performance, drawings, sculptures and paintings. Commonly known for his 'Furniture Sculpture’ series, Armleder gained international recognition with paintings such as his Pour and Puddle Paintings.
Los Angeles-based artist Mark Hagen foregrounds the interplay of materials, process, and form in his geometric, minimalistic paintings, sculptures and installations. Hagen finds inspiration in the breakdown of history, vision and hierarchies and creates works by pushing common and utilitarian materials in directions which reveal the process of making.
For over twenty-five years, Peter Halley’s geometric paintings have been engaged in a play of relationships between what he calls "prisons" and "cells" that reflect the increasing geometricization of social space. Inspired by New York City’s gridded urban plan and by his own isolation within it, he imagines the abstract shape as a barred prison cell connected to the outside world through electronic communication.
Finally, as part of the art collective BMPT, the Swiss artist Olivier Mosset is known for his series of monochrome paintings, each featuring a black circle in a middle of a square canvas. Exploring formats and materials, Mosset then turned to monochrome paintings, a selection of which will be also exhibited on the booth.
Reflective of a research into the visual possibilities of geometric patterns, the artworks exhibited at FRIEZE 2016 will highlight the different practices of artists of the Neo-Geo movement born in the 1980s, of which Peter Halley is one of the founders along with John M Armleder and Olivier Mosset. Mark Hagen can be considered linked to the movement because he shares the conceptualism of Neo-Geo. All of them have been experimenting with various shapes, creating new types of geometric paintings, that rejected a non-objective abstraction of the 20th century.
