ZURICH.-With the exhibition «About Nothing. Works on paper 1964 – 2004», the Kunsthalle Zürich presents an overview of works on paper by Geneva based artist John Armleder (b. 1948). The exhibition will present rare works from the 1960's from the artist's private collection that have never been previously shown together with works from private and public collections that will document his production in this particular medium to this date. The exhibition is being realised in close collaboration with John M Armleder who takes a dominant role in the layout and installation of the exhibition, successfully linking the diverse formats and styles of his extraordinary oeuvre with a site-specific wallpaper presentation. The exhibition will receive the largest group of works on paper that exist in a museum from the collection of the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva. Over the years, a group of approximately 70 works were integrated into the collection in collaboration with John M Armleder.

John Armleder's works on paper build a sort of thread. They centre and connect the comprehensive and always surprising Oeuvre of John Armleder's paintings, sculptures and installations along with his continuous creations in the field of printing, publishing and performing.

With this exhibition we would like to make this thread, the continuity in the artist's oeuvre, visible. His works on paper show the consistent development of an artist who in the past forty years has permanently reinvented himself and who's crucial contribution to the important formal and textual art historical tendencies of this day have left an impact. Starting with his fluxus oriented works to his postmodern appendages of his neo-suprematism, neo-geo and neo-pop works. Currently in an environment where abstraction is being "re-discovered" – not as yet another Neo-Geo but as a palette of subjective and emotionalised relations to form – it becomes apparent how important the works on paper and drawings by Armleder are who decisively contributed to the shaping of the history of abstraction with his oeuvre. Far from the discussions of materiality and from the discourses of the high and low of the late eighties and early nineties, John Armleder's works on paper open a direct insight into his continued confrontation with art, especially with abstract art and in regard to the relationship of art to everyday reality and the artistic act of creation.