Olivier Mosset

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Olivier Mosset (born 1944 in Bern) is a Swiss visual artist who lives in Tucson, Arizona. He has spent important time in New York and Paris. In the 1960s in Paris he joined the BMPT group with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni. The group challenged ideas about authorship and originality, often repeating a simple method across many works and arguing that the art object itself mattered more than who made it. Mosset became known for painting circles: from 1966 to 1974 he made about 200 works that were all the same—a 100-by-100 cm white square with a black circle in the center. He applied semigloss enamel to create a shiny, flat surface. He also made monochrome paintings by transforming objects or walls into paintings, such as a fridge fitted to the same exact dimensions as a canvas.

Earlier in his career he worked as an assistant to Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri. In 1968, The Paris Review published reproductions of five of Mosset’s circle paintings, all identical in size.

In the late 1970s in New York, Mosset produced a long series of monochrome paintings during the rise of Neo-Expressionism. He helped found the New York Radical Painting group, which connected abstraction to social ideas and returned to the radical roots of painting.

Mosset represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and took part in the Whitney Biennial in 2008. In 2007 he donated 171 works from his collection to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland. In 2012 he designed stage sets for the ballet Sous Apparence at the Paris Opera Ballet.

His works are in major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MAMCO in Geneva, and the Cantonal Museum in Lausanne. His art is abstract, conceptual, and minimalist, and he is best known for his monochrome, minimalist paintings, especially the many identical circle paintings.

Mosset also creates sculptures. Since 1993 he has made “Toblerones,” shaped sculptures referencing Swiss anti-tank barriers and the triangular Toblerone chocolate. He showcased many Toblerones in his 2003 retrospective at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, and he made ice versions in 2003 for the Ice Pavilion in Saas-Fee, shown in 2004 at Art Unlimited in Art Basel. In 2014 he re-created ice Toblerones for Elevation 1049 in Gstaad.