Olivier Mosset

Born in 1944 in Bern, Switzerland. Currently lives and works in Arizona, USA.

Over the last six decades, Olivier Mosset has developed a renowned practice that is direct and and self-evident, in pursuit of formal rigour and the physical roots of painting.

Mosset was one of the founders of the historical collective BMPT, which also included Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni, and which questioned fundamental ideas such as creative authorship. BMPT experimented with neutral compositional systems and repetitive patterns, rejecting aesthetic historical foundations and the spectacular nature of the new avant-garde. The more than 200 identical oil paintings that Mosset painted between 1966 and 1974, with a small black circle in the centre of a square white canvas, are seen as the acme of BMPT’s experimental approaches to painting.

Challenging any form of figuration, subjectivity or symbolism, Mosset’s work both contains and rejects the dialectical history of painting. Mosset works with extreme abstraction, with large canvases, diverse forms and bright, monochrome colours. Claiming the autonomy of his work, the artist instigates the physical experience of surface, scale and texture.

An active part of the New York art scene in the 1980s, Mosset emerges as one of the few European painters to place themselves within the American tradition of large-scale painting. Throughout his career, Mosset has experimented with aesthetic resources while maintaining conceptual consistency, claiming “the urgency to start all over again, from the beginning; to question the validity of the painting”.

Mosset has participated in solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; MAMCO, Geneva; Opéra National de Paris; Kunsthalle Zürich; among many others.

His work can be found in the collections of museums such as MoMA, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia; Kunstmuseum Bern; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires; among others.