John M Armleder

Solid Coated

John M Armleder has a keen eye for everyday wonders. How often must he have passed by the famous curry stand "Bier's 195" on Kurfürstendamm before identifying its logo with two concave sausages and a flame above and below as a "pattern"? Artists perceive the world from a different perspective—they recognize something new and unique in everything, something hitherto unseen. In his latest wall painting, Armleder also plays with notions of high and low, combines banality with complexity or gold with pink and neon, and transforms the Wilhelm Hallen into a walk-through artwork. This elegant mural's mysterious Latin title, Tricholomopsis rutilans, turns out to be the tongue-twisting name of a fungus, yet another unexpected clue Armleder provides.

The artist has been shaping trends since the 1980s, and many younger artists still refer to him as an influential figure. A sense of playfulness, openness, the embrace of coincidence, subversiveness, and spontaneity are, to this day, vital elements in Armleder's understanding of art. For example, the large-format Pour Paintings and the triptych Subterraens (2022) show a mixture of colors and materials that cannot actually chemically bond (and yet they do), and in which coincidence plays an essential role. "I'm a total coincidence freak," Armleder notes. "To paradise through coincidences. The Great Coincidence annuls any totalitarianism; it is the great equalizer with intensification." Despite this statement, the Pour Paintings, in particular, show Armleder's acute sense of space and successful composition.

The most prominent feature of all works is their cheerful lightness and effortless elegance, and it is with this that the artist plays the keyboard of what all of us are now familiar with in contemporary art: quotations from art history, patterns and surfaces, mirrors and colors, found objects—fragments from fashion, music and everyday life. "In a way, I mixed everything," Armleder states succinctly. Yet underlying this statement lies an in-depth understanding of art history and a profound engagement with modernism—from Malevich to Op art and from Fluxus to postmodernism.

It is not without reason that Armleder likes to use mirrors and plexiglass, disco balls, and fluorescent tubes in his installations. A recent version that exemplifies these preferences of Armleder is Way Out (2022), with surveillance mirrors scattered across the wall. Either we see ourselves or a will-o'-the-wisp of reality refracted through reflective surfaces since, according to Armleder, a single "reality" does not exist.

Among Armleder's best-known works are his Furniture Sculptures, created from 1983 onward—geometric paintings combined with found and used everyday furniture or even musical instruments, as in the recent work Crash (2022). These works reflect Armleder's concept of combinatorics, not only of media (painting) and things (furniture) but also of layering symbols and mixing contexts, given that we, the viewers, must now do some interpreting ourselves. Works like these activate our perception. They are both ambivalent and ironic as well as flattering and appealing. Armleder lures us into familiar territory with this, thereby creating a new level of reflection.

The artist does not consider the fact that "everything" preexists formally to be a problem; instead, he sees it as an opportunity. He sees art as a continuous offer of communication: "I can't define my work," Armleder explains, “it operates differently every time and for each viewer, and that's how the different spheres of perception interconnect. I still like the idea of a work as an event."

Armleder's art is challenging—it is a conceptual tour de force that involves the art history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with all their developments and intellectual consequences. It is particularly contemporary because, while disguising its sources, it does not deny them. It is singular, even though (and precisely because) the artist rejects typical innovations. It is a carefree, seductive type of conceptual art that satisfies the eyes and senses and—if one commits oneself to it—the critical mind.

— Ingrid Pfeiffer

Translation: Katerine Niedinger

Photos © Patxi Bergé