It only took a few decades, but John Armleder, the prominent Swiss artist, is finally getting his Stateside due. The ICA's "About Nothing: Works on Paper 1962-2007" is, as the title implies, a retrospective (although only of Armleder's abstract drawings, not the furniture sculptures for which he is also known), and his first major exhibition in the United States. But Armleder's been around for a long time, at the vanguard of several of those important art movements that somehow get very silly names — "Fluxus" in the 1960s, "Neo Geo" in the 1980s. (Luckily, his Fluxus offshoot Groupe Ecart, which organizes publications and exhibitions for artists, has a more dignified-sounding moniker.)

"About Nothing" comes to the ICA essentially unchanged from the Kunsthalle Zürich's fall 2004 installation. But "it will look very very different," according to ICA director Claudia Gould, who installed the exhibition with Armleder himself, because the two spaces are so different. It was an "extraordinary task," she says, to get 500 drawings from Europe, but worth it: "He's someone who's really known in Europe but he's really looked at here as an artist's artist, and he doesn't have a dealer here. [Meanwhile] he has 40 rooms opening in Geneva, a retrospective of all his work."

The title, according to Gould, is one of the enigmatic plays on words of which Armleder is fond. "If you ask what his work is about, he would be the first to say 'nothing,' which is partially true in terms of how John thinks. But it's almost funny because everything is there and he says nothing. It's called 'About Nothing' but it's really about everything."