The Swiss John M. Armleder is regarded one of the most important representatives of intermediate contemporary art and has caused a stir as action and concept artist, as well as with his geometric abstractions, installations and found object art.
John Michael Armleder was born in Geneva in 1948. At first he was active as a musician in the "Groupe Luc Bois" began to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva in 1966, however, he stayed there for a short time only. After attending a mixed media course with John Epstein in the English town of Glamorgan, John M. Armleder founded the artist group and later gallery "Ecart" in 1969, which organized publications, exhibitions and art events until their breakup in 1983. In 1977 Michael John Armleder also constituted the "Leathern Wing Scribble Press" and was one of the founding fathers of the Milanese artist cooperative "Laboratorio". John M. Armleder went on several journeys, for instance to Italy, France, England and Egypt.
In his early works John M. Armleder was close to the Fluxus movement and was also occupied with Mail Art. Later he became a protagonist of Neo Geo and created reduced paintings on various types of image carriers that followed the style of Constructivism. He also created various graphics works, objects, installations, environments and found objects. Many works of John M. Armleder are characterized by a specific negation of individual style.
John M. Armleder, who has held posts as professor at the Brunswick University of Fine Arts and the Ecole Cantonal d'Art de Lausanne since 1994, lives and works in his native city of Geneva.
The award winning artist John M. Armleder has been honored with many international solo exhibitions, for instance at the Galleria d' Arte Moderna in Bergamo, Italy in 2004. The same year the prestigious Kunsthalle Zurich showed the exhibition "About Nothing. Works on paper 1964-2004". Works by John M. Armleder are represented in museums and public collections, such as the Kunsthalle Weishaupt Ulm, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, the Berlin State Museums and the ZKM Karlsruhe.