This new exhibition offers a conversation marked by cultural exchanges and aesthetic connections between works mainly in glass by the Geneva-based artist and pieces from Africa, Asia and Oceania selected from the Barbier-Mueller collection.

A close friend of the Barbier-Mueller family, John Armleder made a selection from his body of work starting from a glass sculpture he made in 2017 as a tribute to Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller and which was exhibited at the museum the same year.

John Armleder, À Jean Paul, 2017.

He has chosen works that evoke transparency which have been until now rarely or never exhibited. Pieces from the Barbier-Mueller collection were chosen for the aesthetic connections or contrasts they form with the artist’s works, and for their potential, with the latter, to address and explore the themes of knowledge and traditional skills transmission, of splintering or embedding. Brought together as a group, certain works become the protagonists of a mythological or fantasized narrative.