11 June – 16 August, 2024
Exhibition
Olivier Mosset
benches
June 11 - August 16, 2024
Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to present Olivier Mosset’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a series of bespoke benches inspired by the minimalist forms favored in museum seating.
American abstract painter, Ad Reinhardt, famously referred to sculpture as “something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.” Mosset’s new work suggests avoiding the latter altogether, offering a different mode of interaction within an exhibition space as well as a respite from activity in an environment typically unsympathetic to rest.
The exhibition features a simple row of white rectangles aligned at the center of the space. Their arrangement recalls the Judd stack or church seating and their form is unique only in their near-featurelessness. Mosset’s benches blur the line between sculpture and furniture, becoming altar and pew.
The gallery is also presenting Mosset’s bench at Basel Social Club, 2024, which coincides with the opening of this exhibition. The work is placed on open air farmland behind the residential neighborhood of Bruderholz outside of Basel.
Artist Bio
Olivier Mosset (b. 1944, Bern, Switzerland) currently lives and works in Tuscon, Arizona. Olivier Mosset’s astute and often provocative approach to painting has kept him at the cutting-edge of contemporary art since the late 1960’s. In Paris, he gained recognition as a member of BMPT alongside Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni. This short-lived group of conceptually driven painters reduced the level of skill required to create their work as a means of making art more accessible and to emphasize the importance of the art object over its authorship. After relocating to New York in 1978, Mosset’s body of monochrome paintings were a key influence on the generation of Neo-Geo painters who were to emerge in the 80’s. Keeping always within painting’s particular limitations and concerns and with a deep understanding of the sensuality and physicality of color, Mosset’s work engages acutely with the network of institutional relations that underlie our encounter with art.
Mosset’s work has been featured in several solo and group exhibitions around the world. Solo museum exhibitions include Musée de Beaux-Arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland (1985); Centre d’Art Contemporain, France (1985); “Olivier Mosset 65–85,” Musée Sainte-Croix, France (1985); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (1986); Musée Saint Pierre Art Contemporain, Lyon (1987); “Arbeiten/travaux/works 1966–2003,” Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Switzerland (2003); “Windows,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006); Museo d’Arte di Mendrisio, Switzerland (2009); “A step backwards,” Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, France (2010); “Leaving the Museum,” Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2012); “Sous apparence,” Opéra national de Paris, Palais Garnier, Paris (2012); “Fakes, fêlures and walls,” Musée Régional d'Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussilon à Sérignan, France (2013), Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, USA (2021), MAMCO (Musée d'art Moderne et Contemporain), Switzerland (2020), among others.
Spencer Brownstone Gallery has shown Olivier Mosset’s work since its founding in 1998.