Art Basel’s Swiss fair might dominate the art world chatter in June, but nearby, Zurich Art Weekend has carved out a deserved space in the calendar since it was launched in 2018. Running from June 13th–15th, the event takes place just before the major fair week in Basel—a two-hour train journey away, making it an alluring proposition for the traveling art crowd.
But the occasion is more than a mere curtain-raiser for the nearby art fair. Switzerland’s largest city will host over 75 exhibitions across more than 70 venues, bringing together institutions, galleries, universities, off-spaces, and private foundations in a full-bodied program of art activity. A first for this year is Gallery House, a new art fair hosting 14 galleries in a 430-square-meter hall in the center of town. The city may be best known for its financial sector, but, as the weekend aims to show, its riches flow far beyond the coffers of its private banks.
Galleries in Zurich range from familiar blue-chip names such as Hauser & Wirth through to smaller tastemakers such as Blue Velvet. As you’d expect, there are also solid shows on the institutional side, from the grand Kunsthaus (Switzerland’s largest art museum) to Museum Rietberg, which focuses on non-European art. Free and open to the public, the weekend will also feature more than 150 events, including guided tours, readings, and workshops, as well as a returning program of performances across the city.
Below, we’ve selected seven shows not to be missed during Zurich Art Weekend 2025.
Suzanne Duchamp
Kunsthaus Zürich
Through Sep. 7
An “important yet overlooked figure in modern art,” as the exhibition text explains, early 20th-century artist Suzanne Duchamp never received her due. Yet, she was a key figure in the Dada movement that developed in early 20th-century Paris along with the other avant-garde movements of the time.
Brother of Marcel Duchamp, one of the 20th century’s most famous artists, Suzanne worked in different artistic styles and trends—her paintings riff on Cubism, but they also include fragments of poetry, calling attention to the relationship between word and image in typical Dada fashion.
In the artist’s largest retrospective to date, the full range of her 50-plus-year career is on view, from early geometric works on paper, collages, and paintings that made use of Surrealist and Dada principles. In her later years, after breaking with the movement, she began working on depictions of figures, landscapes and fauna.
Featuring around 50 paintings and 20 works on paper, alongside archival materials, the survey is a chance to understand the career of this remarkably overlooked artist. Indeed, Duchamp’s contemporaries saw her as an important figure who transcended her medium of choice: French avant-garde legend Francis Picabia once said that she “does more intelligent things than paint.”
Pat Steir
“Song” at Hauser & Wirth
June 13–Sep. 13
Pat Steir is an innovator in contemporary painting. The American artist is known for her meditative “Waterfall” paintings: Large-scale, abstract works created by pouring or flinging paint onto vertical canvases. In this series, which she began in the 1980s, Steir’s process is rooted in chance, but it’s far from random. The artist carefully decides where and how to place the pigment, sometimes marking off areas or layering colors to guide its flow. Then, she lets gravity and time pull it freely across the canvas. “The thing that I always have to force myself to do is let the paint hit the canvas, walk away, and let it do its thing,” the artist once said.
Her new paintings at Hauser & Wirth expand on this ongoing series. To make these works, the artist rinsed and layered paint on a background of gridded chalk lines. Here, blocks of paint cascade into deep fields of color, creating meditative canvases.
The exhibition also coincides with the release of a new artist monograph, Pat Steir: Paintings, which will chart the artist’s work from 2018 to the present.
Augustas Serapinas
“Šakotis” at Galerie Tschudi
June 13–Aug. 2
Lithuanian installation artist Augustas Serapinas is best known for his site-specific structures, mostly made with wood, that comment on human relationships to public spaces and built landscapes. In a recently concluded solo show, “Wooden Travel,” at the ICA Milano, for instance, Serapinas partially reconstructed an abandoned wooden house—a typical Lithuanian wooden dwelling—to evoke a historical understanding of a domestic space at risk of disappearing.
In this presentation at tastemaking Galerie Tschudi, Serapinas takes as his cue the Šakotis: a cake traditionally baked over an oven on a rotating spit that is eaten in Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus. This baked item will lend the shape to a new series of sculptures. Formed in conical layers of jagged ‘tree rings,’ the “Šakotis” works are made of gold-colored cast bronze. It’s a playful sculptural study into Serapinas’s familiar themes of history and how it’s perceived in the contemporary moment.
Thomas Ruff
“expériences lumineuses” at Mai 36 Galerie
Jun. 13–Aug. 9
e.l. no. 03, 2024
Thomas Ruff
Mai 36 Galerie
e.l. no. 04 l, 2024
Thomas Ruff
Mai 36 Galerie
To call Thomas Ruff a photographer would be to oversimplify a practice that pushes the boundaries of the medium. Throughout his decades-long career, the German artist has always questioned photos’ truthfulness, playing with the viewer’s preconceptions in his conceptual works. Known for taking a cerebral approach to photography, Ruff often appropriates or digitally manipulates existing images, challenging ideas of authorship.
This show at Mai 36 Galerie homes in on Ruff’s “expériences lumineuses” series that references the science behind the photographic process, explicitly showing the impact of elements such as light rays and glass. In the end result, Ruff captures surface reflections through a carefully put-together studio setup, yielding fascinating results. Some works show sections of glass objects, while others show refractions and convergences of light beams. The resulting images are rich with art-historical references, from Geometric Abstraction to the clashing shapes and typographic elements found in Dada.
“A Love for Detail–Indian Painting from the Museum Rietberg Collection”
Museum Rietberg
Through Jun 29th
The only art museum in Switzerland dedicated to non-European cultures, the Museum Rietberg has built up a formidable collection of works from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania since it was founded in 1952. Part of this collection includes more than 2,000 Indian paintings, one of the most extensive and significant archives of its kind in Europe. “A Love for Detail” presents 60 of these works in the museum’s Park-Villa Rieter section.
Taking a narrative and scholarly approach, the exhibition looks at how Indian painting has been categorized by historians in the past, drawing on the background of how they were made. For example, works on display explore the distinctions between Mughal and Rajput painting styles that emerged in the 16th century and are contextualized with new research explaining how the communities and styles of the two movements intermingled.
Notably, the exhibition also looks to the future, gesturing to the thriving contemporary art scenes of India and Pakistan. This includes works by Pakistani artists Shahid Malik and Donia Qaiser, both of whom reference historical painting traditions from the region.
Saint Clair Cemin
Tobias Mueller Modern Art
June 13–Sep. 20
Throughout his five-decade career, Brazilian sculptor Saint Clair Cemin has been preoccupied with the limits of the form. His most recognizable works—abstract stainless steel monuments—appear as though they are shapeshifting in front of the viewer: fluid, modernist, and globular.
For example, in Vortex (2006), a temporary public sculpture on New York’s Broadway installed in 2012, a 40-foot stainless steel ribbon spiraled upward into the clouds. Physically reflecting its surrounding environment, the work evoked man’s search for transcendence.
But, as this show at Tobias Mueller Modern Art demonstrates, the artist’s oeuvre resists easy categorization. The show features new works by the artist in dialogue with pieces from throughout his career that show how he soaks up influences from across art history. The three-legged Ballerina (2006), for instance, plays with Greco-Roman stylizations, while other figures draw on more surrealistic and abstracted approaches to form.
Mónica Mays
“ridden” at Blue Velvet
June 13–Jul. 26
Autobiography, history, and the material process are central to the practice of the Spanish artist Mónica Mays, who primarily works in sculpture and installation. The artist’s assemblages, often composed of found domestic objects, mimic animals and female figurines that she morphs into twisted, fractured forms.
For her second solo exhibition at Blue Velvet, Mays presents a series of rugged sculptural installations constructed from salvaged industrial and domestic debris, which evoke the style of fairground rides. These “paradise machines” (as the gallery’s text calls them) counter the colorful childlike appeal of the rides by remaking them out of repellent detritus. Leather straps and layers of stitched fabric peel away from these sculptures, a commentary on the decaying nature of desire.
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