John M Armleder Reframes Centuries Of Art History At MAH Geneva

At the Musée d'art et d'histoire (MAH) in Geneva, the museum's historic rooms are being asked to do something unusual: respond to the work of one of the city's most familiar artists. Swiss artist John M Armleder (b. 1948) has taken over the sixth Carte Blanche project with“John M Armleder: Observatoires,” a curatorial and conceptual exhibition that reimagines the MAH's collection through his own open-ended lens.

Rather than imposing a single reading, Armleder has organized the exhibition around broad themes - animals, abstraction, musical instruments, and related motifs - while leaving visitors free to move through the galleries at their own pace. The result is less a fixed argument than a sequence of encounters, where the museum's holdings and the artist's interventions continually shift one another's meaning.

That approach is especially visible in the way the show engages the MAH's architecture. In one room, an oversized disco ball sends fractured light across classical lintels, niches, and bas relief carvings. Elsewhere, paintings and sculptures of animals are set against a wall covered in large graphic lobsters, replacing the museum's usual neutrality with a more playful, disorienting field of color and image. The effect is to make the institution's gravitas feel unexpectedly porous.

Armleder has also introduced newly commissioned temporary structures inspired by drawings in the museum's permanent collection. These movable elements sharpen the exhibition's central concerns: how space is used, how permanence can be unsettled, and how a historic building can be made to feel provisional without losing its authority. In Armleder's hands, the museum becomes less a container than a site of active exchange.

The choice of artist is particularly apt. A longtime Geneva resident, Armleder knows the MAH intimately, and the museum holds more than 500 works by him, including his well-known“Furniture Sculptures” and graphic works. By placing him in the role of curator as well as subject, the Carte Blanche project turns inward, asking how artists help shape the identity of the institutions that preserve them.

“John M Armleder: Observatoires” is on view at the Musée d'art et d'histoire (MAH), Geneva, through October 26, 2026.

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