June is an artistic highlight of the year in Switzerland, with Zurich Art Weekend taking place from June 9–11, followed the next weekend by Art Basel. For their last shows before the traditional summer break, galleries in these two cities are putting up much-anticipated exhibitions featuring internationally acclaimed artists. Here are six shows that should not be missed in Zurich and Basel during this busy month.
Monika Sosnowska
A major benefit of Schaulager’s Herzog & de Meuron-designed building is that its walls can be reconfigured as needed. ‘We can design the architecture specifically for each exhibition,’ says Friedli. ‘It’s fun, but also a challenge.’ These modular capabilities are particularly useful when exhibiting monumental works like Untitled (2006) by the Polish artist Monika Sosnowska, who uses industrial-grade construction materials to explore urban decay, failure, and political ideologies. One of the first works encountered by visitors to ‘OUT OF THE BOX’, Untitled is an enormous metal cube that appears to be squashed and suspended between two walls. Despite being almost three meters tall, the cube’s caved-in shape gives the impression it has buckled under pressure, as though it were made of paper rather than enamel-painted steel. ‘It has the appearance of being very lightweight,’ says Friedli. ‘It looks as if a giant hand has just taken it and thrown it between the walls.’
Robert Gober
With their atmosphere of hushed reverence, it’s no wonder that so many exhibition spaces feel like altars to art. So it was fitting that one of Schaulager’s first permanent artworks, acquired even before Schaulager existed, was a room-sized installation imbued with sacred connotations. At the center of Robert Gober’s Untitled (1995–1997) is a concrete statue of the Virgin Mary, impaled through her abdomen by a hollow pipe. Behind her, a stream of water flows from an unknown source and pours down a flight of cedar stairs before disappearing into storm drains. Like much of Gober’s oeuvre, the work’s meaning is slippery; ‘It’s like a kind of enigma that you cannot solve,’ says Friedli. The combination of religious iconography and water points to purity, while the drains below the Madonna draw contrasts between the sacred and the profane. Additional pieces by Gober on view in the show includes a replica of a body part, namely the cast-gypsum polymer ear Untitled (2008), and a wall sculpture resembling a window covered in hand-cut snowflakes.
Tacita Dean
How can an artist represent the underworld? That was the question on British artist Tacita Dean’s mind when she was approached to design the costumes and set for a ballet based on Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321). Three elements of Dean’s set design for The Dante Project (2021) – co-produced by The Royal Ballet and Paris Opera Ballet – are on view in ‘OUT OF THE BOX’: Inferno (2019), a black-and-white chalkboard drawing of inverted mountains, which served as a backdrop for the first act; Purgatory (Threshold) (2020), a large-scale photograph of jacaranda blooms on which the artist drew in colored pencil; and Paradise (2021), an abstract 35 mm film inspired by the colors in William Blake’s 1824 watercolor illustrations of the Divine Comedy. The works are theatrical even without the stage. ‘They can exist completely independently of the ballet,’ says Friedli. ‘Still, we’re exhibiting them in a way that even though doesn’t imitate their original context gives the physical impression of how the works were used there.’
David Claerbout
Belgian artist David Claerbout presents another form of hellfire in his 24-minute film Wildfire (meditation on fire) (2019–2020). Through his immersive video installations featuring manipulated found video footage or wholly invented landscapes, Claerbout explores technological abstraction and the interplay between digital and physical realms. Depicting a relentless forest fire, Wildfire (meditation on fire) points to the twin crises of our times: urgent ecological devastation and the portrayal of truth in an increasingly digitized world. As new media and generative technology become progressively more sophisticated and integrated within our daily lives, so it likewise becomes harder to differentiate which dangers are real and how seriously we should take the threat on the screen.
Klara Lidén
If that’s all too much eternal damnation for you, relief can be found in a grouping of videos by Swedish artist Klara Lidén, who deliberately misuses public spaces to investigate the relationship between bodies and institutional settings. A particularly frank subversion of space occurs in You’re all places that leave me breathless (2020), which shows the artist clambering up outdoor scaffolding. A simple production trick lends the video a mesmerizing effect: As Lidén scales the scaffolds, the camera rotates with her body, giving the illusion of weightlessness. Gravity comes back to haunt Lidén in the video Warm-up: State Hermitage Museum Theater (2014), in which the artist joins dancers in their pre-show warmups at the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Juxtaposed with the disciplined performers’ graceful forms, the artist’s untrained body seems clumsy. Finally, taking a domestic turn, the 22-second video Out to Lunch (2018) takes place in a kitchen – a fairly unremarkable space until the refrigerator door opens and the artist climbs out. ‘The video is humorous,’ Friedli says, ‘And, of course, it perfectly fits with the title of the exhibition.’
Anri Sala
The Austrian concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein refused to accept setbacks. When the musician’s right arm had to be amputated after he was shot during World War I, he commissioned the composer Maurice Ravel to write him a piece of music that could be played with only the left hand. Several decades later, Albanian artist Anri Sala filmed two musicians playing the one-handed melody as part of his multimedia installation Ravel Ravel (2013). When the work was presented in the French Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, the two videos were simultaneously projected in a vertically stacked configuration, emphasizing their slight differences in tempo. However, since the ceiling height at Schaulager doesn’t allow for the original stacked presentation, Sala suggested showing the videos on two semi-transparent screens, allowing viewers to see the ghostly shape of one performer’s hand through the other going in and out of sync. ‘The interesting thing about the work - apart from the fact that it is a beautiful piece of piano music - is that through this presentation the difference, the interval in the interpretation of the identical composition becomes perceptible on different levels, visually, acoustically, but also physically,’ says Friedli.
Dieter Roth
‘OUT OF THE BOX’ will be accompanied by a new publication dedicated to Dieter Roth’s Selbstturm; Löwenturm (1969/70–1998). The book focuses on Roth’s eponymous installation. Housed in the artist’s former workshop adjacent to Kunsthalle Basel | Gegenwart, Selbstturm; Löwenturm comprises several shelves stacked with rows of fragile self-portraits and lions’ heads. The busts are cast from chocolate and sugar over the course of nearly 30 years. Acquired by the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation as an evolving artistic concept in 1989, the work has presented an interesting challenge for conservators as, over time, the biodegradable sculptures have decayed and deformed. But Roth wouldn’t mind: The German-Swiss artist was convinced that, to truly engage with life, art should undergo constant transformation.
The exhibition OUT OF THE BOX was conceived by Heidi Naef, Senior Curator, together with Schaulager’s research team. The image concept for the publication Dieter Roth. Selbstturm; Löwenturm has been designed by the artist Peter Fischli.
‘Design for a Garden’
von Bartha, Basel
Through July 15, 2023
This group exhibition, curated by British artist Andrew Bick, features works by more than 20 Swiss and international artists and designers, including Elena Damiani, Marianne Eigenheer, Athene Galiciadis, Emma Kunz, Karim Noureldin, and Bick himself. Titled ‘Design for a Garden’, it takes the garden not so much as a thematic framework but rather as a guiding image: Artworks – for the most part non-figurative and including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, ceramic, sound, and graphic design – are intuitively displayed and combined in the gallery so as to encourage free associations as well as physical and mental wandering. With its emphasis on shapes and patterns, the exhibition presents artistic production as a search for the perfect union between the geometric and the organic, the spiritual and the mathematical.
Caption for full-bleed image: Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Furious Waves (detail), 2020. Photo by Andreas Zimmermann. Courtesy of the artist and von Bartha. Please note a dark filter was applied over the image for readability.
Simon W. Marin is a curator and writer based in Zurich and Lausanne.
Published on June 2, 2023.