Sans Titre, 1991
Art Paris 2024

Olivier Mosset   Emerging artists

Olivier Mosset (born 1944 in Bern) is a Swiss visual artist who lives and works in Tucson (Arizona) and in Switzerland.

Olivier Mosset is mainly known to the public for having been part in 1967 - 1968 of this movement initiated by four artists in revolt against the artistic institution: Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni. Even though for the young generation of contemporary European and American painters, he is today a major symbolic figure, the rest of his career is still poorly understood. His work is not limited to the famous “Circles” of the BMPT era. Through geometric abstraction, monochrome then post-abstraction, she deploys a meditation, uninterrupted for forty years, on the future of painting in the era of globalized capitalism.

Its impact, strong enough for Olivier Mosset to be appointed to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1990, is due to its very particular inscription: Olivier Mosset is indeed the only European painter to have immediately placed himself in the posterity of the great abstract painting (Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, Jasper Johns), and to have thus been able to effectively participate in the artistic debates which took place in the USA at the turn of the 80s and 90s. Living since 1977 between the two continents, mediator between the two cultures, thanks to this dialogue, he has built a work that matches both American formats and Western critical reflection.

(Catherine Perret).