The Best of Zurich Art Weekend

For the ninth edition of Zurich Art Weekend, which ran 12–14 June, the solemn Swiss finance capital presented its most beguiling side, sun shining and water glistening. The Art Journal took a stroll around the city, from chic Rämistrasse via edgy Wiedikon to the Löwenbräu arts centre by the Limmat, stopping to chat to gallerists, artists and curators on the way.

Installation view of Avery Singer's 'War_overlays’ at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse, until 5 September 2026 © Avery Singer, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Jon Etter.

HAUSER & WIRTH, LIMMATSTRASSER

For War_Overlays, Avery Singer’s first paintings made with AI, the US artist has turned the gallery's upper floor into a casino, complete with red curtains, tiled carpet and staged CCTV. With its smell of synthetic carpet, floor-standing ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, and a lonely houseplant, the exhibition (which continues to 5 September) is a sensory overload. The windows are covered in plastic mirrors, and surveillance cameras hang from the ceiling. Instead of slot machines we have paintings suspended on metal poles featuring young women wearing facemasks, their features slightly skew-whiff or glitched out. She trains a custom AI (LoRA) to create a base figure, then tiles it with imagery of contemporary war. The AI model’s failures remain visible: a US marine in a keffiyeh, for example – glitches she calls ‘AI slop’.

Installation view, Karen Kilimnik, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Waldmannstrasse, Zurich, 2026 © Karen Kilimnik, courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber. Photo by Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich

EVA PRESENHUBER, WALDMANNSTRASSE
Karen Kilimnik likes shiny things. Her small, baroque-style paintings feature glittery stickers, hamsters, butterflies, and rabbits. They have titles like island of the flower rulers, the flower harvest, fairyland and shipwrecked on Flower Island. A selection of Fabergé eggs sits on an antique, marble-topped table covered in artificial snow. In another space, an outsize bouquet of silk flowers creates a joyful counterpoint to the sterile white cube environment. The seventy-one-year-old artist’s spirited embrace of kitsch and her careful attention to motifs and gaudy items spark joy. The exhibition continues until 24 July.

Installation view of Ekene Emeka-Maduka at Fabienne Levy, Zurich. Photo by Tristan Savoy.

FABIENNE LEVY
In Lord of the Flies: The Plot Tickens, you are confronted with Ekene Emeka-Maduka’s small-scale paintings of school scenes: a classroom, a schoolyard, a changing room. Images of an imaginary Nigerian boarding school, a system she once inhabited, is here compressed into a model of society. Across paintings and works on paper, some made during a Swiss residency, her hyperreal figures move between discipline and play, authority and invention, inside the enclosed world of the dormitory and the teaching room. Painted in oil, sometimes with wax-print fabric worked into the surface, the scenes carry her bold colour and intricate detail. Lord of the Flies and Things Fall Apart surface as dissonant school reading, refracted through a postcolonial education and an unreliable memory. The work stages how identity is formed through rehearsal. Continues until 12 September.

Installation of Not-Yets by Hana Miletić at Galerie Tschudi, 2026. Photo by Cedric Mussano, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tschudi.

GALERIE TSCHUNDI

At Not-Yets, Hana Miletić’s first solo at Galerie Tschudi (continues until 1 August), the Croatian artist’s freehanging Joins splits the room in two with its floor-to-ceiling panels in oatmeal, grey and cream, based on a photograph of cement-filled cracks in a Bukhara façade. Loose threads trail where the mending shows. It is street repair at architectural scale. Miletić calls these ‘minor gestures’: makeshift fixes improvised against scarcity and absent state care. Materials uses taped-up shopfront glass from New York's Financial District. The Jacquard loom she uses runs on punch cards, an ancestor of today’s computer programming languages. In Untitled [Softwares], she feeds errors into the punch cards, resulting in loose threads opening gaps onto what lies behind.

Alice Kettle, Gold and Silver Rhythm, 2026, courtesy of Anna Helwing Gallery.

ANNA HELWING GALLERY

In Alice Kettle’s first Swiss solo show, Circadian Threads, which continues until 17 July, bodies are fragmented, broken; faces stare out at the viewer. The British artist builds her figures from dense, brushstroke-like stitch; gold, crimson, cobalt and blush massing against bare cream cloth, forms surfacing and dissolving in the thread. Her stitches are largely machine-worked, sewn on backgrounds made of her paintings that she scans, reworks in Photoshop and prints at scale. Trained in painting at Reading, then in textiles at Goldsmiths, the Somerset-based artist is emeritus professor of the subject at Manchester School of Art.

Mickael Marman, 'Zug', at Damien and the Love Guru.

DAMIEN AND THE LOVE GURU

Norwegian-Gambian artist Mickael Marman delivers a contemporary take on the Swiss Alpine landscape with a side note of social critique in Zug at Damien and the Love Guru. The exhibition, which runs until 24 July, features interpretations of the landscapes of a Swiss canton dubbed ‘Crypto Valley’, where heavily taxed Norwegian billionaires now decamp as self-styled ‘tax refugees’. Marman paints Norway's fantasy of Switzerland, a place most Norwegians have only met in newspaper headlines. Made from his viewless Oslo studio, the canvases exaggerate an expatriate's imagined Alps: coarse weave bleeding murky greens, bruised purples, fleshy pinks and acidic yellows. Mountains, skies, plants — nothing resolves. Built with fabric dyes, the surfaces keep bleeding over time, slowly disintegrating. Pedestals decoupaged with financial papers carry titles drawn from real billionaires' initials. The gallery is known for its playful approach to formats, and at Gallery House, an informal art fair organised by gallerists, their only work is a crate of Zürischum Rosé Magnum — ‘Zhampagne’ as the producers have billed it, featuring Ștefan Tănase’s screenprints on the label.