Dairy Art Centre celebrates its opening with a tribute to the Swiss artist John M Armleder (Geneva, 1948; lives and works in Geneva), by staging his largest ever solo exhibition in the UK. The exhibition, curated by Alessandro Rabottini, presents a vast array of different media, and alternates works made specifically for the occasion such as Y Raid, with those from the collections of Dairy Art Centre founders Frank Cohen and Nicolai Frahm.
Armleder’s work thrives within the tension between avant-garde culture and pop culture, blurring the boundaries between them. This is witnessed by the multimedia installation in the Dairy Art Centre's space known as the Fridge. Within this installation we find a variety of sound and video pieces: segments of B-movies, films and videos made by the Groupe Ecart in the 1960s, documentation of happenings and performances, musical scores and optical experiments are presented in an accumulation of audio-visual information and without any hierarchical distinctions. This impressive installation clarifies a key aspect of Armleder’s work: the strategy of accumulation, of the joyous cohabitation of different things as a paean to the multiplicity of the forms of human existence, a celebration of the coexistence and equivalence of values through the principle of quantity. On these warehouse shelves the artist has stacked faux and real flowers, stuffed animals, his works in multiples and various other materials, creating a landscape where natural and artificial, original and copy, coexist.
Courtesy The Dairy Art Centre, London
