5. Neo Geo

1. Introduction  |  2. Stuttgart Roots  |  3. Dialogue: From Bauhaus to American Minimalism  |  
4. Dialogue: Minimalism in European and American Contemporary Art  |  5. Neo Geo  |  6. "Review:
Reconsidering Form, Space and Line"

During the mid-1980s, a young generation of artists began referencing Concrete Art again, often subversively and ironically breaking with its mandates. Starting with the 1984 exhibition Peinture abstraite curated in Geneva by the Swiss artist John M Armleder (3, 49), the movement was soon characterized by the term Neo Geo or New Geometry. For the exhibition, Armleder gathered together works by contemporary artists, some of whom are represented here. The Frenchman Olivier Mosset (51) and the Austrian Gerwald Rockenschaub (52) were among the artists who deliberately opposed the neo-expressive tendencies of the 1980s. Mosset, who went to New York in 1978, also belonged to the inner circle of the Radical Painting group. The Austrian Heimo Zobernig (48) bases his conceptual, multimedia pieces on systems of categorizations taken from various contexts such as the alphabet, natural numbers, primary colors, and basic geometric shapes like circles, lines and rectangles. Artists who participated in the exhibition curated by Armleder included Sol LeWitt (50), a representative of classical 1960s Minimal Art, as well as Verena Loewensberg (30), a forerunner – so to speak – and representative of Concrete Art.