John Armleder: Again, Just AgainOct 16, 2021 - Dec 19, 2021
- Venue:
- Rockbund Art Museum (20 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai)
- Curator:
- Larys Frogier, Billy Tang
- Artist:
- John Armleder
- Support:
- Rockbund, Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council, OXO SENSES, Douyin
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Rockbund Art Museum is very pleased to present the first major survey exhibition of the renowned Swiss artist John Armleder in China. “Again, Just Again” will be on display from 16 October, 2021 to 19 December, 2021. As the inaugural highly anticipated exhibition after the museum’s major renovation, “Again, Just Again” is a celebration of his influential five decades of work and inspired by the many inter-disciplinary detours in art throughout this journey. The exhibition features an ambitious display of new and existing work such as painting, ready-mades, works created on-site, works on paper, site-specific wall drawings, and archival material. With each floor of the museum, the spaces inside and outside of exhibition halls have been transformed through a unique scenography assembled to guide the audience through a choreography of unexpected encounters and visual experiences.
Taking the spirit of the artist’s embrace of chance, open-endedness, and collective experimentation, the exhibition is also proud to include collaborations between the artist, the museum, and other practitioners to intervene, translate, and ultimately to extend new associations and meanings in response to different elements of Armleder’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Following the artist’s long curiosity into inviting collaborators outside of the world of art to re-appropriate and completely redefine the order and way of seeing his work, the museum is delighted to commission the acclaimed Shanghai-based photographer, Leslie Zhang, to take authorial direction over an entire exhibition hall on the third floor, transforming the space into a contemplative mis-en-scene, whose spatial and aesthetic design will draw on his own personal language and memories in response to a curated selection of Armleder’s works. Elsewhere on the fifth floor, an ambitious and rare display of the artist’s drawings and experimental works on paper, ranging from pen and ink, watercolor, gouache, acrylic oil and collage, will be installed in conjunction with archival material and a unique site-specific wall drawing, a rich and layered ensemble created especially for the exhibition in conversation with the artist.
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With Armleder’s multi-sensorial repertoire of different art-making rules and techniques, compositional questions such as improvisation and order serve as an underlying concern in many works, connect to the artist’s longstanding interest in the history of painting and the evolution of its form. Many of his works push, short-circuit, or collapse the specificity of painting through challenging the conventions that connect the paint, canvas, and stretcher. Actions such as pouring, splashing, and chemical reactions loosen or heighten the level of authorial control by the artist. As Larys Frogier, the Director of Rockbund Art Museum elaborates, “John Armleder always cultivates ambiguous visual and conceptual situations where patterns, colors, objects are very much clinically or rigorously organized, composed, installed, repeated, while they are conveying a strong feeling of uncertainty and visual experience that everything is possible as long as we are available to welcome the chance, the accident, the displacement.” His connection to experimental painting is often in dialogue with other mediums and influences outside of the field of art; sometimes they are traces created from a performance, or arranged together like a visual score, allowing works to be repeated using different materials and in circumstances that create further variation, blurring the separation between the before and after.
Rather than isolated objects, his paintings and other series of works are regularly presented with other objects, such as furniture, to highlight or contrast their formal qualities, textures, color, or symbolic function as they collide with other media. Therefore, the emphasis of chance takes on a new dimension as a path to go beyond what is expected or easily predicated, giving the chance to escape an arbitrary limit. This approach defines Armleder’s consistent refusal to stay within the margins of one singular style, format, or rule. He joyfully skates between different boundaries of an eclectic range of genres and artistic influences: from Modernism to Constructivism, Op-Art, Pop, Fluxus performances, and abstract or gestural painting. Likewise, the flux between art and everyday life is constantly utilized as a creative energy to cross-fertilize with other influences outside of the field of artworld: from high and low design, avant-garde music, and Hollywood B-movies.
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Special Supported from: ROCKBUND, Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council
Outdoor Media Partner: OXO SENSES
Mobile Video Promotion Partner: Douyin
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About the artist
Born in 1948, Geneva, Switzerland, John Armleder has been defining figure across many different fields and discourses related to art through an influential career that has continually involved interchanging fluidly between the roles of painter, performance artist, sculptor, archivist, collector, curator, editor, and sometimes gallery owner. In 1969, he co-founded the group ECART (écart means “gap,” “interval,” “divergence” in French) in the spirit of the Fluxus movement. During the 1970s and 1980s, ECART were prolific as a bridge between Switzerland and the outside world, which involved a prolific output of multi-faceted activities and collaborations with a large number of leading artists of the era, including Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. Exhibitions and performances were participatory and experimental, created at a time with a strong collective desire to transform the world. The structure of ECART functioned as a hybrid alternating between functions as a publishing house, bookstore, and gallery, a pioneering model whose influence provided a vital blueprint for ideas still used in institutions and alternative spaces today.
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About the collaborator
Leslie Zhang is a photographer based in Shanghai. Born in 1992, Zhang’s photographic works is devoted to examine and reinterpret Chinese contemporary culture with concrete traditional inheritance and poetic new narratives.
Fashion work by Leslie has been published in international and domestic publications including Vogue, Marie Claire, T Magazine, LOVE and in close cooperation with world-wide fashion brands naming Gucci, Prada, Thom Browne, Moncler, etc. The photographer is included in the 2019 editions of BoF 500 and Dazed 100, the global searches of leaders and talents shaping our culture today. He is included by Forbes Asia in a 30 under 30 list for the arts.
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About Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council
Pro Helvetia is dedicated to the promotion of contemporary cultural works of national and international interest. It also fosters co-productions or exchanges between Swiss artists and artists from other countries, in particular from countries where Pro Helvetia has a regional office.
Pro Helvetia Shanghai is founded in 2010 and represents the Swiss Arts Council in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. Its aim is to encourage dialogue between Swiss and Chinese cultural practitioners and institutions by supporting projects that enhance the exchange of knowledge and experience in the cultural field.
For Pro Helvetia’s latest projects in China, please check our website: https://prohelvetia.cn/en/
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John Armleder / Frutti di Mare
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John Armleder / Untitled
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John Armleder / Powder Series
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John Armleder / Untitled (FS 185)
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John Armleder / Twinkle
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John Armleder / Double Cap
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John Armleder / Installation Mnémorique
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John Armleder / Little Mill
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John Armleder / FS155
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John Armleder / Furniture Sculpture No.30
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John Armleder / de M & G H
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John Armleder / MB (FS)
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John Armleder / VoltesII
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John Armleder, Zhang Jiacheng / Huqiu Park
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John Armleder / Garioch
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John Armleder / Rose Bank
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John Armleder / Vitrine tables 1, 2 & 3
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Tickets:
Closed on every MondayTuesday - Friday
Regular Ticket: 50 RMB
Concessionary Ticket: 30 RMB
Weekend (Saturday & Sunday)
Regular Ticket: 60 RMB
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