Zürich Art Weekend 2025 unfolds across seventy-five exhibitions and seventy-one venues—not as a prelude to Art Basel, but as a destination in its own right. From June 13 to 15, the city’s galleries, museums, foundations, and experimental spaces form a living cartography of Europe’s contemporary artistic consciousness. Long synonymous with discretion and precision, Zürich reveals a more layered cultural identity: one rooted in intellectual inquiry, artistic experimentation, and civic generosity. If Basel is where the market convenes, Zürich is where ideas crystallize. Amid alpine air and the stillness of Lake Zürich, exhibitions unfold at a tempo that invites attention, not distraction. Here, thought moves deliberately—and the art world listens.
This sensibility takes shape at Kunsthaus Zürich, where programming during the weekend reflects a shift from display to dialogue. The landmark exhibition “Suzanne Duchamp: The Forgotten Radical” (May 3–August 11, 2025) anchors the institution’s contribution, while Jeffrey Gibson’s long-term installation Art for All (June 13, 2025–December 31, 2026) inaugurates its new Chipperfield-designed hall as a civic interface.
Suzanne Duchamp: The Forgotten Radical
Kunsthaus Zürich
Altstadt
Suzanne Duchamp, “The Wedding,” 1924,
Oil on canvas, 66 x 92.1 cm, Private collection
© Suzanne Duchamp / 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: Gina Folly.
Perhaps the most historically resonant exhibition of the weekend is “Suzanne Duchamp: The Forgotten Radical” (May 3–August 11, 2025)—the most comprehensive institutional survey to date dedicated to the early twentieth-century artist. Featuring around fifty paintings and twenty works on paper, alongside archival materials, the exhibition traces the full arc of Duchamp’s career, from Dada-inflected collages and Cubist experiments to the more figurative, pastoral works of her later years.
Long eclipsed by the towering figure of her brother Marcel, Duchamp is here reframed not as a footnote, but as a vital interlocutor in the Parisian avant-garde. Her syncretic use of fragmentation, poetic inscription, and conceptual gesture—seen in works such as Radiation de deux seuls éloignés (1916–1920)—presciently anticipates post-war strategies of text-image interplay.
What we love: Grounded in recent scholarship, the exhibition avoids reductive recovery narratives and instead makes the case for Duchamp as a sophisticated and fiercely independent artist whose influence radiates across twentieth-century experimentation.
Suzanne Duchamp at Kunsthaus Zürich
May 3–August 11, 2025
Jeffrey Gibson: boshullichi / inlʋchi – we will continue to change
Kunsthaus Zürich
Altstadt
Jeffrey Gibson, “boshullichi / inlʋchi – we will continue to change,”
Ausstellungsansicht Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025,
Installation view Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025,
© Jeffrey Gibson, Photo: Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich.
Opening on June 13, 2025, Jeffrey Gibson’s “boshullichi / inlʋchi – we will continue to change” transforms the entrance hall of the Chipperfield Building at Kunsthaus Zürich into a monumental, immersive environment. Merging painting, sculpture, screen printing, beadwork, ceramics, and textiles, the installation is Gibson’s first museum commission on the European continent and is expected to remain on view through the end of 2026.
Gibson—who represented the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale and is of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent—infuses the Haefner Foyer with a kaleidoscopic visual language grounded in Indigenous traditions and contemporary abstraction. Drawing on the Choctaw words boshullichi (to dismantle and transform) and inlʋchi (to rebuild anew), the title encapsulates a philosophy of continual change. Conceived as a dynamic civic space open to all, the installation repositions the museum’s threshold as a site of cultural exchange—poetic, political, and inclusive.
What we love: Jeffrey Gibson’s transformation of the Chipperfield Hall feels less like an installation and more like an invocation—a bold reimagining of institutional space as communal gathering. We’re moved by how his layered materials and Indigenous symbology create not just visual impact, but emotional resonance, offering visitors a place to pause, reflect, and enter into dialogue.
Jeffrey Gibson at Kunsthaus Zürich
June 13 – End of 2026.
Pat Steir: Song
Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse
Löwenbräukunst
Installation view of Pat Steir’s “Song,” Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth Zürich.
At Hauser & Wirth Zürich, “Song” marks Pat Steir’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Europe and a commanding continuation of her iconic “Waterfall” series, cultivated over the past four decades. On view from June 13 to September 13, 2025, the show features monumental paintings in which poured pigment falls freely yet deliberately across canvas, governed by gravity and gesture alike. Beneath these liquid surfaces lie chalk-drawn grids—structural traces that quietly assert compositional control. This interplay between surrender and system forms the basis of Steir’s expanded painting practice, merging post-minimalist rigour with a meditative attention to process. Though often associated with contemporaries like Brice Marden and Agnes Martin, Steir departs from both in her embrace of unpredictability—a choreography of intention and chance.
Her work draws deeply on East Asian philosophies of mark-making, particularly the tradition of shan shui painting, while maintaining a distinctly American idiom shaped by conceptualism and abstraction. Colors are not mixed but layered in translucent veils, allowing perception to build slowly, temporally. Steir likens her pour ratios to “salad dressing”—the balance of oil, pigment, and turpentine yielding delicate harmonies of weight and flow. The exhibition coincides with the release of a new monograph, Pat Steir: Paintings, featuring essays by Colm Tóibín, and includes a revival of a 1970s wall drawing from her studio. In an art world increasingly attuned to speed and surface, Song offers something rarer: a spatial philosophy of attention, where time is embedded in material, and the act of looking becomes a form of listening.
What we love: “Song” doesn’t just revisit Pat Steir’s iconic “Waterfall” series—it deepens it, inviting viewers into a space where painting becomes both performance and philosophy. What’s striking is how the gallery itself seems to slow down around her work. This is abstraction that breathes.
Pat Steir at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse
June 13 – September 13, 2025
Franz West: Die frühen Werke / Early Works
Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Maag Areal
Installation view of “Franz West: Die frühen Werke / Early Works,” Courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Maag Areal, Zurich 2025.
Marking the twelfth exhibition in his long-standing relationship with the gallery, “Franz West: Die frühen Werke / Early Works” (June 13 to October 3, 2025) revisits the Austrian artist’s formative period (1975–1990) through a selection of sculptures and objects from private collections, including that of his close friend and champion, Peter Pakesch. At its heart are West’s radical Passstücke (Adaptives)—lumpy, amorphous papier-mâché forms designed to be held, worn, or carried. These playful, bodily encounters broke with modernist convention, transforming art from passive object into participatory experience. Also on view are his upholstered “furniture-sculptures,” shaped by instinct rather than design, further blurring lines between sculpture, prop, and body.
Once seen as Vienna’s irreverent post-actionist, West here emerges as a thinker deeply shaped by Freud, Wittgenstein, Lacan, and Musil. His absurd, tactile forms—often made from discarded materials—translate neurosis into sculpture, rejecting monumentality in favour of intimacy and interaction. A Golden Lion recipient at the 2011 Venice Biennale and subject of major retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern, West is celebrated for reimagining what sculpture can do. The exhibition includes archival photographs by Friedl Kubelka and films by Andreas Reiter Raabe and Bernhard Riff, and will be accompanied by a rare public conversation between Pakesch and Hans Ulrich Obrist on June 14.
What we love: This exhibition peels back the intellectual and irreverent roots of Franz West’s practice, revealing not just how his early works challenged the boundaries of sculpture, but how they actively invite a kind of physical awkwardness and psychological honesty.
Franz West at Galerie Eva Presenhuber
June 13 – October 3, 2025
Saint Clair Cemin:
Tobias Mueller
Altstadt
Saint Clair Cemin work, Courtesy of Tobias Mueller.
Saint Clair Cemin, “Nymph II (with baseball glove)” (2011). Artwork details: Marble. Courtesy of the artist and Tobias Mueller Modern Art, Zurich. © and Courtesy of the artist and Tobias Mueller Modern Art, Zurich.
Brazilian sculptor Saint Clair Cemin, born in 1951 in Cruz Alta, brings his material-rich and philosophically infused practice to Zurich in a show that spans both retrospective and recent works (June 13 to September 20, 2025). After formative studies in philosophy and physics, Cemin moved to Paris in the late 1970s—immersing himself in printmaking at the École des Beaux Arts—before shifting towards sculpture. A key figure in the 1980s East Village scene in New York, he created expansive public works such as Vortex (2006), a 40 foot stainless steel ribbon that spiraled skyward on Broadway and became emblematic of his engagement with form, space, and environment.
The Zurich presentation is deliberately structured as a layered panorama: new works converse with seminal sculptures like Ballerina and Nymph II (with baseball glove), which meld Greco Roman classical references with playful surrealism. Through an approach that juxtaposes figuration, abstraction, ornament, and architectural allusion, Cemin probes the metaphysical and corporeal dimensions of sculptural practice. As he has remarked, “It’s impossible to create more than what you are. You can only unveil more of yourself”—an introspective ethos visible in these visually arresting and conceptually dense forms.
What we love: Saint Clair Cemin’s Zurich exhibition feels less like a timeline and more like a myth unfolding in real time—where bronze, steel, and marble channel something ancient yet uncannily present. We’re especially drawn to how his sculptures navigate the space between dream logic and architectural precision, offering not just objects to look at, but questions to dwell in.
Saint Clair Cemin at Tobias Mueller
June 13 – September 20, 2025
Thomas Ruff: expériences lumineuses
Mai 36 Galerie
Kreis 1
Thomas Ruff, “Substrat 34 I,” 2007, c-print | edition of 3 + 1 AP, ed. 2/3, 81.1 x 73.23 in (206 x 186 cm); Courtesy of the artist and Mai 36 Galerie.
Thomas Ruff work from “expériences lumineuses,” Courtesy of the artist and Mai 36 Galerie.
Thomas Ruff’s “expériences lumineuses” at Mai 36 Galerie marks a compelling return to the fundamental interplay between photography and the physical world of light and optics. On display from June 13 to August 9, the exhibition showcases seven monumental canvases—each over two metres tall—depicting patterns of refracted light and prismatic phenomena captured through a bespoke studio apparatus. Ruff, working hands-on in his Zurich studio, orchestrates a precision system of multiple light beams, prisms, lenses, and mirrors, reminiscent of physics-class experiments, to generate unpredictable yet meticulously composed visual phenomena. According to gallery notes, the light was projected through objects onto whiteboards and inverted digitally to transform luminous rays into almost painterly stripes and shapes.
The result is neither documentary photography nor digital illusionism, but a poetic ontology of perception. By printing these inverted light-forms on primed canvas, Ruff bridges the gap between scientific imagery and abstraction. The works resonate with the legacy of Dada and Constructivist experimentation—evoking a lineage of 20th-century avant-garde engagement with material phenomena—while offering a distinctly contemporary meditation on visibility and representation. In an era saturated by digital images, Ruff reasserts the photographic medium’s capacity to probe the metaphysics of light and truth, echoing Berenice Abbott’s belief that “scientific truth and natural phenomena are as good subjects for art as…man and his emotions.”
What we love: Thomas Ruff’s latest works don’t just play with light—they make you question what it means to see at all. In these oversized, spectral compositions, physics becomes poetry, and the camera turns into a philosophical instrument.
Thomas Ruff at Mai 36 Galerie
June 13 – August 9, 2025
A New Archetype
Gallery House Zürich
Zürich-West
At Gallery House Zurich,
Jean-Vincent Simonet, “Valve,” 2025; 200 x 160 cm (2 panels of 100 x 160 cm); ink, oil pastel, acrylic and matt varnish on synthetic foil mounted on aluminium, flush frame; Courtesy of the artist and Sentiment.
What may well be the weekend’s most quietly revolutionary gesture is the debut of Gallery House Zürich, a 430 m² collaborative platform that purposefully resists the siloed commercialism of traditional art fairs. Fourteen galleries—including Blue Velvet, Damien & The Love Guru, Federico Vavassori, Francis Irv, Fitzpatrick Gallery—share the space with non-profit initiatives like Parkett and Studioli Roma, collapsing the familiar divide between presentation and proposition.
Housed in a former textile warehouse, the venue’s scenography favors porous circulation and strategic pauses. Artworks are installed with contemplative care, balancing the monumental with the meditative. Echoing the spirit of early Liste or Independent, Gallery House charts a subtler course: no boom of commerce, but a soft-spoken rethink of what exhibition-making can feel like.
Gallery House Zürich runs June 5–15, 2025, and its inaugural stride—by prioritizing collective rhythm—sets a brave new tone for Zürich’s art ecosystem.
What we love: Gallery House Zürich doesn’t just introduce a new space—it models a new tempo for how art can be experienced and shared. We’re especially drawn to its hybrid spirit, where commercial galleries and nonprofit voices cohabitate without friction, creating a rhythm that feels more like a conversation than a marketplace.
Gallery House Zürich
June 5 – 15, 2025
Beyond exhibitions, Zürich Art Weekend activates the city with over 150 events ranging from artist talks and panels to book launches and performances. Friday’s premiere of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s “Archives: Gustav Metzger – All of Us Together” at Luma Westbau promises both historical resonance and curatorial intimacy, offering insight into one of the twentieth century’s most radical voices through the lens of his long-time collaborator.
Elsewhere, “Each and Every Gesture” at Cabaret Voltaire remaps queer resistance through experimental film and performance—rendering Spiegelgasse, once the cradle of Dada, into a site of embodied memory. On Sunday, the “Interdisciplinary Talk Series” continues at Luma with Jeffrey Gibson, Paavo Järvi, and Abigail Winograd exploring the liminal terrain between art, music, and Indigenous epistemologies.
The full schedule of Zürich Art Weekend’s public programming is available at zurichartweekend.com, offering a modular itinerary for those wishing to navigate the weekend by curiosity, theme, or serendipity.
Zürich Art Weekend 2025 offers a constellation of exhibitions, performances, and conversations that privilege depth over display. What emerges is not an event, but a structure of meaning—quietly radical in its refusal to rush. In a calendar dominated by the spectacle of Basel, Zürich offers a moment of reflection—and increasingly, that’s what sets it apart.
