Born on February 23rd. 1947 in Morges (Switzerland), son of a sculptor, Grégoire Müller is raised in the posh life-environment of his maternal grand’parents. At the age of fourteen he chooses the path of Painting, inspired by Picasso, Pollock and De Kooning, partly as a way to escape the conformism of the Swiss establishment. After graduation (latin – greek) at the Collège de St. Maurice, he moves to Paris and briefly attends the Académie de la Grande Chaumière to draw from live models. Soon involved with radical artistes such as Daniel Buren and Olivier Mosset, he puts his brushes aside to question the very notion of Art through writing. In charge of the Art page in Pariscope, he is also a corespondant for Art and Artists (London) and for Artsmagazine (NY). As the May 68 events unfurl (he is incarcerated for three days) the hope for a “counterculture” rises. After collaborating with Harald Szeeman on the legendary When Attitudes become Form exhibition, he leaves Europe in 1969 to go live in New York.
First he works as an assistant of Richard Serra, then as a house painter, construction worker, free-lance critic… before becoming the Editor of Artamagazine (readership: 12’000). As such, he gets to meet all the leading artists of the time and publishes original contributions by Dali, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Serra, De Maria, Lewitt, Acconci…
During the same years he discovers Zen and the practice of Karate with the great Master Peter Urban (by 1986, he will be a 5th. Dan Black Belt.) It is also a period of experimentation with drugs (LSD, mescaline…) as well as a time of immersion in the world of Jazz (Ornette Coleman in particular) thanks to his friend the painter Frederick James Brown.
In 1972, after the publication of his book on The New Avant Garde (Praeger Publishing, NY, Pall Mall, London and Alfieri, Milan), he suspends hia activities as an Editor and art writer to re-connect with Painting, while teaching part-time at the School of Visual Arts. First influenced by Clement Greenberg and the Color Field painters, he resolutely moves on to Figural Art (1975). Soon spotted by the legendary talent-scout Richard Bellamy and by the collector Robert Scull, he has a big exhibition at the Oil and Steel gallery that catches the attention of Michael Brenson of the New York Times.
In 1986, perhaps apprehending the trappings of early success, he leaves New York with his spouse, the singer song-writer °Pascal. After a stay in Tuscany (Monte Amiata) and in France (Château de Jau), they settle in the Swiis capital of watch-making, La Chaux de Fonds, where they have been living since with their two daughters, Saskia and Misha-Laura (his daughter Francesca, from a previous marriage, living in London.)
Ex part-time teacher at the Haute Ecole d’Art (Neuchâtel) and at the Lycée Blaise Cendrars (L.C.d.F.), author of a few books (Editions de l’Aire), Grégoire is above all a painter who chose a relative isolation to develop a very personal approach to representation in Painting, refusing to lean on either photography or academism, inspired by the great modernists as well as by Renaissance masters. His work is represented in a number of public collections, including the MoMA and the Zürich Kunsthaus.