A blue square with black lines

Olivier Mosset
(Born 1944 Switzerland; lives and works in New York and Tucson)
'Spinner', 1992
Oil on canvas
214 x 214 cm
UBS Art Collection

Olivier Mosset, along with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni, co-founded the minimalist artist collective BMPT in the 1960s. This group aimed to initiate a new beginning in painting, challenging the prevailing avant-garde movements that emphasized symbolism, subjectivity, metaphor and expressiveness in painting. They focused on formal rigor and utilized neutral, repetitive patterns and basic forms. After moving to New York in 1978, Mosset's monochrome paintings significantly influenced the Neo-Geo painters, including Peter Halley, who emerged in the 1980s.

Mosset continues to advocate for abstract painting that is detached from any representation. His works are striking not only for their apparent simplicity, but also for challenging established art-making methods. He believes that the viewer should be confronted solely with the material aspects of the work—pure color and shape on a support. Mosset is concerned with the dialogue between his extremely reduced pictorial elements and the surrounding space. After series with circles and a monochrome phase, he focused on horizontal and vertical stripes and geometric shapes. Paintings such as Spinner (1992), which consists of a black band against a turquoise background, reference Russian Constructivism and Swiss Concrete art.

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