Tobias Mueller Modern Art and Galerie Oskar Weiss are pleased to announce Drive Through, a two-site exhibition by Olivier Mosset, on view from September 4 through October 31, 2026, across both galleries at Waldmannstrasse 8 and Sonneggstrasse 82 in Zurich. The exhibition presents new works by Mosset and is accompanied by an essay by art critic and curator Bob Nickas.
Spanning two locations, Drive Through brings together different aspects of Mosset’s practice, reflecting an artistic trajectory shaped by repetition, refusal, and continual renewal. For six decades, Mosset has approached painting as both object and idea, repeatedly questioning its conventions, its authorship, and even its supposed death. Moving between monochrome and geometric painting, industrial fabrication and the artist’s own hand, his work has remained in constant motion while persistently returning to painting’s most fundamental conditions.
At Tobias Mueller Modern Art, three chameleon-color paintings on honeycomb panels – Huey, Louie, and Dewey (all 2025) – shift chromatically according to light and the viewer’s position. They are presented alongside the site-specific wall work Untitled (Torri) (2017), four industrially fabricated benches, and a Harley-Davidson with a custom-painted chameleon-color fuel tank. Together, the works form a spatial composition animated by the movement and presence of the viewer.
Further, four new geometric paintings – presented at Galerie Oskar Weiss – mark Mosset’s return to painting with a brush, after many years of working with industrial processes and fabricators. Late Afternoon, Sunday Morning, Five To Seven, and Drive Through (all 2025) explore the encounter of one color with another while recalling earlier moments in Mosset’s practice.
The exhibition’s title evokes both the everyday culture of movement and transit and, more broadly, an artist who has passed through decades of shifts, detours, and returns without ever coming to a standstill.
Biography:
Olivier Mosset, (*1944 in Bern, lives and works in Tucson, USA) is one of the central figures in post-war abstract painting, and a pivotal reference for generations of European and American painters. Associated with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni, he was a member of the ephemeral group B.M.P.T. His extensive series of circle paintings, executed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is among the most widely discussed works of that era.
Mosset moved to the US in 1977 and was part of the vibrant New York art scene of the 1980s. His later and recent paintings explore monochrome and geometric abstraction, with all the analytical rigor of his early works. With hindsight, Mosset emerges as one of very few European painters to place themselves within the American tradition of large scale painting (the legacy of Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, or Barnet Newman), but he remains attentive to developments within the art scenes he traverses, too, and has supported artists whose practices differ from his own.
Mosset’s work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum Bern; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MAC–Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon; Le Consortium, Dijon; MAMCO, Geneva; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
His work has been featured in several solo and group museum exhibitions worldwide, including Musée des Beaux-Arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, (1985); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Paris, (1985); Musée Sainte-Croix, France (1985); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (1986); Musée Saint Pierre Art Contemporain, Lyon (1987); Swiss Pavilion at the 44th Venice Biennale (1990); with Cady Noland, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (1999); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006); Museo d’Arte di Mendrisio, Switzerland (2009); Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, (2010); Kunsthalle Zürich (2012); Opéra national de Paris, Palais Garnier, Paris (2012); The Power Station, Dallas (2015); Hunter College Art Galleries, New York (2016); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2019); MAMCO, Geneva (2020; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson (2021); San Carlo Cremona, Cremona (2023)