John Armleder

“360°” is the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to the Swiss artist John Armleder (Geneva, 1948), whose work is divided in drawing, painting, sculpture, environmental installation, performance, video, sound and music works, combining in a pervasive and provocative synthesis, different elements such as case and project, high culture and entertainment, irony and analysis, function and aesthetic research.

Retracing the entire research of the artist, the exhibition deepens all the aspects of Armleder’s artistic practice, including more than 90 works and beginning with a selection of drawings from the ‘60s. The presentation of Armleder’s pictorial production includes the series of “Dot Paintings” (various types of patterns whose subject is always the dot, the basic element of each graphic production), of “Pour Paintings” (formed by draining pure pictorial material) and “Puddle Paintings” (in which the pictorial material is distributed on the canvas placed horizontally on the floor, also incorporating three-dimensional objects).

The exhibition presents a selection of the “Furniture Sculptures” produced by John Armleder since the ‘80s. These sculptures, composed of reassembled furniture items, in some cases become real environments. 

Armleder defines an aesthetic which is not hierarchical but liberating and democratic, based on the infinite variation, and even contradiction, of the creative process. In his paintings, wallpapers, piles of bricks, Christmas balls clusters, tangles of fluorescent neon, sculptures/assemblages of “objets trouvés”  – like the rolled carpets coming from other artists’ exhibitions (the red one on which Maurizio Cattelan exhibited the effigy of Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite or the blue one exposed at Madre museum by Wade Guyton in 2017) – Armleder recognizes and welcomes the daily life in which the artist is immersed, treats art as life, revealing its full potential.

Two canvases by Armleder, created for this exhibition, introduces a new contemporary presentation of Tiziano Vecellio’s “Danae”. A critical and playful tribute to one of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance and Baroque collections of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples. The image of the deity, Jupiter, transformed into golden rain to settle the young mortal woman, echoes in the dripping and in the subtle game of the two- and three-dimensionality of Armleder’s "Puddle Paintings". 

The exhibition presents the 1984 “Sans Titre” lacquer on canvas, which inspired the intervention commissioned by Madre museum and realized by Armleder in 2017 for the contemporary art collections of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples. “SPLIT!”, a site-specific wall painting, is placed in dialogue with the “Grande Cretto Nero” by Alberto Burri (1978). Armleder reflects its structure in pure color and reverses the monochrome of the Cretto preferring a multi-color palette inspired by the porcelain and biscuit of the Real Fabbrica di Capodimonte.

A brain in a glass and a skull-mirror are presented at the beginning and at the end of the exhibition. They reconstruct the dynamic between life and death that permeates the Neapolitan culture. Armleder conceived the exhibition at Madre museum as a dedication to the city of Naples: a single large installation that tells of an encounter and shares its experience, its progress between the sacred and the profane, high and low, cultured and popular or, simply, between art and life.