BMPT (art group)

BMPT was a Paris-based late modern art group formed in the mid-1960s by painters Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, fr, and Niele Toroni, which was the main representant of Minimalism in France in the 1960s with the group fr.

ideals of the group

BMPT was established to challenge established methods of art-making and to theorize a new social and political function for art and artists. The group pursued a radical criticism of the traditional methods of art by theorizing its new possibilities.

history

In 1966–67, BMPT presented five exhibitions, or manifestations, that questioned authorial prerogative and the institutionalizing role of the Paris Salons. More broadly, BMPT reflected critically on the spectacular, self-conscious nature of the new avant-garde in France. They tested established ideas of artistic authorship and originality by implying that they often made each other’s works, while emphasizing the objecthood, rather than the originality, of their paintings.

Seeking to create art that was simple and self-evident, they suppressed subjectivity and expressiveness in favor of practical systems, such as the utilization of neutral, repetitive patterns and an apparent eschewal of aesthetic historical grounding: as in Daniel Buren's painting with woven black and white stripes or Niele Toroni's metric square brush strokes of oil on canvas. This stance reached its apotheosis in the zero degree paintings of Olivier Mosset - more than 200 identical oil paintings of a small black circle at the center of white canvas one meter square produced between 1966 and 1974.