Background
Olivier Mosset was born on November 5, 1944 in Bern, Switzerland. He was born in the family of a chemical engineer. His childhood and youth passed in Neuchatel.
Olivier Mosset was born on November 5, 1944 in Bern, Switzerland. He was born in the family of a chemical engineer. His childhood and youth passed in Neuchatel.
As a young artist, Mosset was an assistant to both Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri. In 1965, he moved to Paris.
His first solo exhibition was held in the Galerie Rive Droite gallery in Paris in 1968.
Later, in New York in the late 1970s, Mosset undertook a long series of monochrome paintings, during the heyday of Neo-expressionism.
Mosset has spent considerable time in New York and Paris. His work has been featured in several solo and group exhibitions. Recent solo museum exhibitions include “Arbeiten/travaux/works 1966-2003” at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in Switzerland (2003), “Windows” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2006), “A step backwards” at the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon in France (2010), “Leaving the Museum” at the Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2012).
In 2012 Mosset created stage designs for a ballet, entitled Sous Apparence, at the Paris Opera Ballet.
As a sculptor, from 1993 onwards Mosset has created "Toblerones", which are meant to reference the Swiss anti-tank barrages. He exhibited a large selection of his "Toblerones" at his 2003 retrospective at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2003, Mosset also created a version of "Toberlones" in ice for Eispavillon in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, presented the following year in 2004, at Art Unlimited in Art Basel. In 2014 the artist re-created a version of his "Toblerones" in ice again for the Elevation 1049 exhibition in Gstaad.
Mosset currently lives and works in New York and Tuscon, Arizona.
In Paris in the 1960s Mosset was a member of the BMPT (art group). He also became a founding member of the New York Radical Painting group, radical referring both to an implied radical social stance, as well as a returning to the radical “root” of painting.
