On the occasion of the "Art + Design of a European Private Collection" sale on Wednesday, September 23, 2020, PIASA presents a coherent set of furniture and works of art by artists from the second half of the 20th century, including Olivier Mosset.
Born in Bern, Olivier Mosset currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. After being in Paris from 1965 to 1977, he moved to the United States and participated in the "Radical Painting" and "Neo-Geo" movements. From the beginning of his career, Olivier Mosset opted for radicalism. In 1965, he reached the zero degree of painting by executing paintings representing only the letter A, in black on a white background.
In 1966-1967, he became one of the members of the B.M.P.T. group. (Buren- Mosset-Parmentier-Toroni) which aims to rid painting of the notions of originality and uniqueness, thus undermining the system of symbolic and aesthetic value of the work of art.
Each of the four painters proposes a unique pattern of great simplicity that he applies repeatedly, wanting to show only what he presents: for Mosset, a black circle 15.5 cm in diameter and 3.25 cm thick, painted in the center of a square of 1 meter x 1 meter (the vertical stripes for Buren, and horizontal for Parmentier, the brush prints for Toroni).
According to Mosset, the common principle consists in admitting that the figure conceived by each one belongs by right to all. Painting, as he understands it, exists independently of its authors, as a visual self, independent of any context. Thus, on the occasion of the events organized by B.M.P.T. (whose existence was as brief as it was intense since it was limited to one year), each of the artists of the group could, if he wished, have fun painting the motives of the others.
The realization of the circles for Mosset continued until 1975 and gave rise to some rare variations as illustrated by our silkscreen print, White Circle on Black Background, which offers the rare example of a canvas showing a white circle on a black background.
From the time of his installation in New York in 1977, he devoted himself to monochrome: from then on, painting was considered an object. Since then, Mosset has been pursuing an extremely coherent painted work around questions of appropriation, repetition and erasure.
