Olivier Mosset – Wheels

When Olivier Mosset bought his first motorcycle — a US Army surplus Harley Davidson — in Paris back in the late 1960s, he helped start up a subculture still wholly unknown in Europe at the time: the motorcycle club. The young painter’s studio on the Rue de Lappe doubled as a hub of radical painting — conceptually reduced black circles on a white canvas — and a garage cum hangout for the first Marxist-influenced motorcycle club, whose members sympathized with the May ’68 student revolts. Cars and motorcycles have been a driving force in the life and work of Mosset: as an attitude and lifestyle, as a means of transportation and later, from the mid-1990s, as readymades. WHEELS retraces his artistic career through the interplay between motor vehicles and painting, including brief descriptions of each vehicle he used and how it ties into his biography.

224 pages, 27 x 20cm, softcover, Edition Patrick Frey (Zurich).