Zürich Art Weekend returns for its ninth edition from June 12th to 14th, bringing together over 75 exhibitions and 150 events across more than 70 venues in one of Europe’s most concentrated art showcases.
The event also falls a few days before nearby Art Basel opens on June 16th, making the weekend an ideal pit stop for continental visitors.
Zürich has long had one of Europe’s densest gallery scenes. Local stalwarts such as Mai 36 Galerie, international names like Hauser & Wirth, and a cluster of younger spaces have made the city dynamic and varied. Art Weekend is when it all opens at once over a coordinated program that also includes parties and talks. A dip in the crystal-clear waters of the Limmat River, which runs through the city, is also highly recommended between art excursions.
“Zürich Art Weekend shines a light on one of the defining strengths of Zürich’s art scene: its culture of exchange,” the gallery weekend’s founding director, Charlotte von Stotzingen, told Artsy. “Historically, Switzerland has been a place of transit, dialogue, and international encounter, and during the weekend, these often invisible connections become tangible.”
From veteran painters making long-overdue European debuts to a landmark retrospective that has traveled across the continent, here are eight shows worth building a weekend around.
Michel Pérez Pollo
“Double Gaze”
Mai 36 Galerie
June 12–August 8
Cuban-born, Madrid-based painter Michel Pérez Pollo’s fourth show at Mai 36 Galerie is built around the concept of doubles—two versions of the same object placed side by side, close enough to look identical but subtly, unsettlingly, not.
Pérez Pollo starts by making small clay models of figures and objects, then enlarges and exaggerates them on canvas with a loose, fluid application of paint. His recent “Un Otoño” series of large oils on linen, some stretching to more than 4 meters in length, uses warm, muted palettes and rounded forms, making familiar things seem strange.
For “Double Gaze,” those tendencies are focused through the act of duplication. These works play with the ideas of originals and copies without ever resolving the question of which is which.
James Jarvaise and Henry Taylor
“Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked”
Hauser & Wirth
June 12–September 5
One of the most anticipated openings of the weekend, this is the first European exhibition to bring Henry Taylor—one of today’s most celebrated painters—into dialogue with his teacher, California modernist James Jarvaise (1924–2015).
Jarvaise spent decades teaching at schools in and around Los Angeles, including USC, CalArts, Occidental College, and eventually Oxnard College, where he was head of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts. It was there that a young Taylor enrolled in the 1980s, and Jarvaise immediately identified something exceptional.
Jarvaise gradually retreated from public life, painting in near-total privacy—a 2012 survey at Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles being a rare exception—by the time Taylor broke out as a major artist in the 2010s.
The show brings together Jarvaise’s cool, linear landscape abstractions from 1963, including Hudson River School Series (Segora Hills) and Man in the Room, with Taylor’s intensely human paintings of Black American life. While the contrast between the artists is striking, their painterly connection is unmistakable.
Adam Cruces
“Pastels”
Blue Velvet
June 11–September 5
Zürich-based artist Adam Cruces fills Blue Velvet’s walls with a large group of small pastel works installed in a tight arrangement of objects, landscapes, bodies, faces, rooms, animals, and fragments from film (including David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, 1986).
Each image is compact and immediate, and their subjects accumulate rather than build a single narrative. The gallery describes the accumulated effect as evoking “a fragmented experience of reality, where even hyper-recognizable elements manage to evade an overt sequence of meaning.”
Born in Houston, Cruces has been based in Zürich since completing his MFA at Zürich University of the Arts in 2013, when he began working with local tastemaker Blue Velvet. His work—which also encompasses sculpture and video—has also been shown at Kunsthaus Baselland, the Swiss Institute in Milan, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Marisol
Kunsthaus Zürich
Through August 23
María Sol Escobar (1930–2016), better known as Marisol, was one of the defining figures of the New York art scene in the 1960s. Indeed, even Andy Warhol was a fan, but towards the end of the 20th century, her reputation faded, as his only grew. This traveling retrospective, the first comprehensive survey of her work in Europe, traces the full arc of her career, from early portraits to large political tableaux to the late marine life sculptures she was still making into her eighties.
Born in Paris to Venezuelan parents, Marisol grew up between Caracas and New York, and studied with celebrated Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann. By the early 1960s, she was making life-size, painted wooden sculptures of politicians, celebrities, and everyday people built from rough-hewn blocks of wood combined with found objects, cast body parts, and flat graphic elements, often with depictions of her own face on others’ bodies. These works are strange, funny, and genuinely startling in person, sitting somewhere between Pop art and folk carvings.
The show was organized in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and traveled via the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen before arriving here.
Hana Miletić
“Not-Yets”
Galerie Tschudi
Croatian artist Hana Miletić photographs details of crumbling infrastructure: cracks in pavement, patched walls, and improvised repairs in public space. She then hand-weaves textiles that translate those images into cloth. The results are large, tactile, and time-consuming to make: the artist spends hours rendering a crack in concrete as woven thread.
Miletić has been building a reputation in Europe over the past decade and was named among Artnet’s groundbreaking fiber artists of 2025. In the last year, she has also had her U.S. museum debut at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; as well as her first U.S. gallery solo show with Magenta Plains in New York. “Not-Yets” is her first solo show at Galerie Tschudi, which is based in the Engadin area of Zürich.
Carmen D’Apollonio
“It’s All a Big Mystery”
Tobias Mueller Modern Art
June 12–August 29
At local mainstay Tobias Mueller Modern Art, Carmen D’Apollonio presents a series of ceramic lamps that look like they have personalities.
The forms are hand-built in an experimental way. Parts of these lamps lean, tilt, and bulge in unexpected directions. D’Apollonio treats her surface glaze the way a sculptor handles texture, not just as a finish, but as a way of articulating a form, such as adding emphasis to a curve.
The lamps vary considerably from piece to piece. Some emit a dim, ambient glow through porcelain shapes, while others are more sculptural, drawing attention to proportion over light output. There’s a streak of humor in her works, too: one lamp’s shade sits at a pronounced tilt, like a hat worn at a wrong angle; another has a base that curves and rests rather than stands.
Born in Zürich, D’Apollonio came to ceramics after a decade as an art director in film and several years as an assistant to artist Urs Fischer.
Lily Ludlow
“Hunting the Wren”
Grieder Contemporary
June 12–September 25
Hortus and Griselda, 2026
Lily Ludlow
Grieder Contemporary
Hortus and Griselda, 2025
Lily Ludlow
Grieder Contemporary
Los Angeles–born artist Lily Ludlow paints bodies that dissolve into curving, interlocking shapes. Her canvases are heavily worked, with chalk and graphite alongside acrylic, giving them a density and layered, matte texture.
The figures in her canvases tend toward the ceremonial, grouped in what could be ritual or performance, or isolated in poses that suggest dance, specifically the ballet arabesque in which one leg is extended behind. That flowing, repeating curve—which also appears in Islamic and Art Deco ornaments—runs through much of Ludlow’s painting, where figures and decorative forms merge until it’s not always clear where one ends and the other begins.
A recent work, Hortus and Griselda (2025), sets its animal subject— named after a character from medieval literature—in a garden; creature imagery recurs across the show. Indeed, the exhibition title, “Hunting the Wren,” borrows from a Celtic folk custom in which the wren was ceremonially hunted, a ritual bound up with sacrifice and renewal. It fits the mood of Ludlow’s paintings, which are charged with the energy of formal performance.
Ludlow, who lives and works in New York, has shown at Hauser & Wirth, CANADA, and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, among others. Grieder Contemporary is in Küsnacht, about 15 minutes from the city center.
Katja Schenker
“Caryatids Go for a Swim”
Museum Haus Konstruktiv
Through Sep. 6
This show marks a double occasion: a career survey of Swiss artist Katja Schenker’s practice in drawing, performance, and installation, and the inauguration of Museum Haus Konstruktiv’s newly expanded spaces in the Löwenbräukunst-Areal, central Zürich. Schenker is best known for installations built from rope, wood, and organic materials in which gravity, tension, and the trace of physical action become the focus of the artwork.
In this show, the exhibition’s title piece—a live performance—makes use of the eight massive pillars that define the new gallery space. In its staging on opening night, five women took up positions beside them and began throwing balls of string to one another. Over time, a dense net-like structure formed between the pillars, with the strings also threaded through two metal objects fitted with copper-spring grids that deformed and transformed as the throwing continued.
The reference is to the caryatids of classical architecture: women figures who substitute for columns. The performance is a kind of thought experiment: What if those figures put down the weight of the roof they carry and moved freely? The drawings on view explore similar territory through a different method. Schenker covered her body in gouache and pressed herself directly against paper, leaving a body-shaped imprint as a starting point. She then drew outward with oil sticks simultaneously, building lines in deep reds that radiate from the point where her body made contact. The result is part self-portrait, part performance documentation.
Five videos of past performances, made between 2011 and 2026, are also on view in an adjacent glass box.
