FR EN
1 / 3
an image of a painting of a cross on a blue backgroundan abstract painting of a blue and yellow square with vertical linesan image of a picture of a painting on a easel in a room
Featured lot selected by the auctions House.
Premium Piguet Hôtel des Ventes

2412 - John Armleder (1948), Untitled , 1983, oil on canvas, signed…
See original version (French)

Estimate CHF 8,000 - CHF 12,000
Sale commission
Description
John Armleder (1948), Untitled , 1983, oil on canvas, signed, monogrammed and dated on the reverse, 120x65 cm Provenance: Galerie Malacorda, Geneva On the reverse: label from Galerie Marika Malacorda, Geneva A leading figure in the contemporary Swiss art scene, John Armleder founded the Ecart group in Geneva in 1969, together with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner. Functioning as a collective, an exhibition space and a publishing house, Ecart became one of the main European hubs for Fluxus-related practices during the 1970s and helped to establish Geneva within an international network of artistic exchange. From the late 1970s and particularly in the early 1980s, Armleder revisited the vocabulary of modernist abstraction. Geometric forms, monochrome surfaces and elementary motifs are revisited with a deliberate detachment, straddling the line between homage, quotation and a questioning of the notions of style and originality. This exploration developed in parallel with his first ‘Furniture Sculptures’, begun in 1979, in which paintings and everyday objects are combined within a single installation. Created in 1983, this work belongs squarely to this defining period. Against a uniform blue-grey background, three parallel, closely spaced vertical yellow lines are intersected by two horizontal segments arranged at different heights. The extreme economy of means, the precision of the construction and the asymmetry of the composition all refer to the language of geometric and constructivist abstraction, whilst revealing the way in which Armleder subverts its conventions. The painting no longer asserts a modernist ideal of formal purity; it becomes a repertoire of available signs, open to being cited, displaced and reinterpreted. This approach places Armleder amongst the artists who, in the early 1980s, renewed the perspective on geometric abstraction and foreshadowed the explorations soon to be associated with the Neo-Geo movement. The year 1983 marks precisely the intensification of these explorations in his work. The provenance from the Galerie Marika Malacorda is particularly significant. A key figure in the Geneva avant-garde, with close ties to the Ecart and Fluxus networks, Marika Malacorda supported Armleder’s work from an early stage, publishing his works from the late 1970s onwards and exhibiting them regularly in the early 1980s.
See original version (French)
Auto-translation. Refer to original language for legal validity.
About the sale Art from the Orient and the Far East – Paintings and sculptures
Auction location
Auction time 09/23/2026 at 10:00 AM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
You may also like