John Armleder is Swiss performance artist who was born in Geneva in 1948 and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. He lives and works between New York and Geneva. His artistic production began in the 1960s, when he joined the Fluxus group of neo-Dadaist origin, created in 1962 from an idea of George Maciunas, a Lithuanian-American artist.
The Fluxus claims that elementary gestures promote the advance of the creative act in the flow of daily life as evidenced in music, dance, poetry, theatre and various other performances. The aim of the group is to abolish, to the extent that this is possible, the boundaries between various artistic disciplines as well as between the artist and public and between art and life.
In 1969 he founded the Ecart group alongside Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner. Thanks to his experience and work with Ecart, Armleder’s art is a model of life as a product, which is open to chance and improvisation.
From the 1980s onwards, he devoted himself to painting, especially abstract painting made up of monochromatic backgrounds on which repeating points or other simple geometric modules or drippings appear. Frequently, he combines his paintings with stacked furniture, objects hanging from the ceiling or even fixed outdoors, musical instruments, and fluorescent neon lights among others.
