Olivier Mosset
Born in 1944.
After discovering Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg at an exhibition in Bern in 1962, he moved to Paris the following year and became Jean Tinguely’s assistant. He also worked with Daniel Spoerri and drew closer to Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni. Together, the four artists organised “manifestations” in 1967 that challenged the usual formats of exhibitions and the established tradition of painting.
From 1966 onwards, Mosset painted a series of repeated circles, followed by paintings with vertical stripes. These simple motifs and their repetition call into question the idea of composition and individual authorship. Based in New York from 1977, he developed monochromes and geometric works, while also exploring the cut or shaped canvas: circles, crosses, stars and other forms that turn the painting into an object in space.
Mosset represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1990. The collections of MAMCO and the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne document his career over several decades, from his early experiments to his more recent monumental paintings. His works invite us to look at painting for its own sake: its surface, format and colour, and the conditions in which it is produced and viewed.
