John Armleder’s oeuvre reflects sustained engagement with abstraction as a field of experimentation rather than resolution.

Painting and sculpture are approached not as distinct categories but as parallel modes through which questions of form, material, and intention are continuously tested.

Across his paintings, Armleder mobilizes acrylic and mixed media to create compositions that oscillate between geometric structure and deliberate indeterminacy. Layers, repetitions, and chromatic excess coexist with moments of restraint, producing surfaces that appear both constructed and contingent. Systems are invoked only to be subverted: grids loosen, patterns dissolve, and gestures interrupt order without abolishing it. Titles act less as explanatory devices than as conceptual cues, reinforcing the artist’s refusal for fixed meaning or narrative closure.

The sculptures extend his language into the three-dimensional space. Cast in bronze, yet stripped of monumentality, they articulate a quiet tension between balance and instability, presence and neutrality. The restrained forms resist symbolism, functioning instead as everyday objects that occupy space with deliberate ambiguity, echoing the non-hierarchical logic at work in his paintings.

John Armleder is currently exhibited and curating the exhibition Observatoires – Carte Blanche à John Armleder, at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva.

His work is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; Museion Foundation – Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Bolzano, Italy; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.