For centuries, the Rothschild name has been synonymous with the movement of capital, commodities, and ideas across borders. Today, within the Swiss headquarters of Rothschild & Co, that history finds an unexpected contemporary counterpart in “Materials,” the fifth edition of the Rothschild & Co Switzerland Exhibition Series. Rather than celebrating commerce, the exhibition invites viewers to look beneath its surfaces, tracing the often invisible journeys of objects, resources, and value systems that shape contemporary life.
A Platform for Art, History, and Global Exchange
Installation View “Dwellings,” Rothschild & Co, Zürich, 2022.
Artworks by: Hélène Fauquet, Dexter Dalwood, Josephine Reisch
(f.l.t.r). Image courtesy Rothschild & Co Bank AG, Zürich, Edouard
Montassut, Paris, Simon Lee Gallery, London and Galerie Noah
Klink, Berlin.
Launched in 2021, the Rothschild & Co Exhibition Series has established itself as a distinctive platform for cultural dialogue. Each annual presentation reflects the international heritage of the Rothschild family while offering visibility to leading contemporary artists working across Europe and beyond. The program transforms the firm’s premises into a space where art, history, and critical inquiry converge, an approach that feels particularly resonant at a moment when global supply chains, resource extraction, and economic interdependence have become central concerns of public discourse.
Curated by Jonathan Levy, “Materials” takes as its point of departure the Rothschild family’s historic involvement in commodities such as coffee, cotton, iron ore, and gold. These materials once traveled through trading routes that helped define the industrial era and contributed to the emergence of modern global networks. Yet rather than revisiting this history through documentation, the exhibition approaches it through the lens of contemporary artistic practice, asking what materials can reveal about the systems that produce, transport, and assign value to them.
Artists Reveal the Stories Embedded in Materials
Installation View “Identities,” Rothschild & Co, Zürich, 2024.
Artworks by: Melike Kara. Image courtesy Rothschild & Co Bank
AG, Zürich and Jan Kaps, Cologne.
The result is a compelling group exhibition bringing together ten artists whose practices explore the relationship between matter and meaning. Across sculpture, photography, installation, painting, and video, the works reveal how materials carry traces of labor, desire, economics, and power.
One of the exhibition’s strongest contributions comes from the breadth of perspectives represented. British artist Anthea Hamilton continues her exploration of the body, fashion, and display through works that blur distinctions between sculpture and design. Her textiles, rugs, and furniture-like structures transform familiar materials into playful yet sophisticated reflections on consumption and desire. Hamilton’s work has long occupied a unique position between popular culture and contemporary art, and here it serves as a reminder that even the most ordinary materials are embedded with social and cultural narratives.
Nearby, Swiss-Italian artist Lorenza Longhi turns her attention to the aesthetics of luxury and commercial display. Drawing on the visual language of retail environments, advertising, and merchandising, Longhi exposes the mechanisms through which value is constructed. Her marble Business Card(s) sculptures and new silkscreen works transform symbols of networking and social performance into objects of critical contemplation. In an exhibition concerned with commodities, Longhi’s contribution feels especially timely, highlighting the increasingly blurred boundaries between image, aspiration, and economic exchange.
Questions of value emerge even more explicitly in the work of New York-based artist Hugh Scott-Douglas. His celebrated Chopped Bill series enlarges altered one-hundred-dollar bills into monumental abstractions, revealing the coded systems through which financial value is authenticated and circulated. The works occupy a fascinating territory between painting and documentation, transforming currency into image while simultaneously exposing the fragility of the systems that sustain it. In the context of Rothschild & Co, these works create a particularly intriguing dialogue between art and finance, material and symbolic value.
Installation View “Moving Narratives,” Rothschild & Co, Zürich,
2023. Artwork by: Andreas Schulze. Image courtesy Rothschild &
Co Bank AG, Zürich and Galerie Six Friedrich, Munich.
Material transformation is also central to the practice of Lucie Stahl. Her glossy, resin-coated works combine scanned images of consumer packaging, body fragments, magazine cuttings, and organic matter into dense visual assemblages that resemble both advertisements and digital screens. Elsewhere, photographs of oil residues from abandoned Albanian oil fields reveal an unexpected beauty within the remnants of extractive industry. Stahl’s work captures one of the exhibition’s most compelling tensions: the seductive surfaces of contemporary life and the industrial realities that lie beneath them.
Among the younger voices in the exhibition, Marie Matusz offers a particularly nuanced exploration of contemporary infrastructures. Her sculptural works translate invisible systems, data networks, logistics, and technological processes, into physical form. Combining industrial materials with painterly interventions, Matusz reveals the hidden architectures that organize daily life, making abstract systems tangible and visible.
The exhibition’s broader strength lies in its refusal to treat materials as passive substances. Instead, commodities emerge as active carriers of stories and relationships. Whether through Sarah Staton‘s denim works examining cultural power and labor, Fabian Reetz‘s investigations into East German Gothic subcultures, Kelly Tissot‘s observations of rural landscapes, or Min Yoon‘s reflections on artistic production itself, each artist demonstrates how materials record histories that often remain overlooked.
Where Contemporary Art Meets Commerce and Culture
Installation View “Systems & Codes,” Rothschild & Co, Zürich,
2025. Artworks by: Joep van Liefland. Image courtesy Rothschild
& Co Bank AG, Zürich and Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin.
What makes “Materials” particularly successful is its ability to connect these diverse practices through a shared inquiry into circulation. Commodities are never presented as abstract economic units. Rather, they appear as objects shaped by human labor, cultural desire, technological systems, and geopolitical realities. The exhibition encourages viewers to consider not only what things are made of, but also where they come from, who produced them, and how they move through the world.
In doing so, “Materials” offers something increasingly rare: an exhibition that is intellectually ambitious without becoming didactic. It acknowledges the complexities of global trade and production while remaining grounded in the sensory and poetic possibilities of contemporary art.
At Rothschild & Co, a place historically associated with the movement of wealth and commodities, this meditation on material culture feels both unexpected and remarkably fitting. The exhibition transforms the firm’s collection initiative into something larger than corporate patronage. Instead, it becomes a thoughtful examination of the systems that connect objects, people, and histories across time a reminder that every material carries within it a story waiting to be uncovered.
Installation View “Dwellings,” Rothschild & Co, Zürich, 2022.
Artworks by: Julian Göthe. Image courtesy Rothschild & Co Bank
AG, Zürich and Suns.Works, Zürich.
Installation View “Dwellings,” Rothschild & Co, Zürich, 2022. Artwork
by: Dexter Dalwood. Image courtesy Rothschild & Co Bank AG,
Zürich and Simon Lee Gallery, London.
