Ahead of Art Basel, Zurich Art Weekend Returns with Strong Offerings 

Marjorie Strider at Galerie Gmurzynska

Galerie Gmurzynska is hosting an exceptional exhibition spread across its two spaces of American Pop artist Marjorie Strider, who was also the subject of a show at the gallery’s New York location that closed in April. Strider, who died in 2014, is underknown compared to her male contemporaries, with whom she and they were constantly in exchange of artistic styles and ideas. Luckily, that is beginning to change as art historians and curators have slowly begun reevaluating who has been left out of the canon. (Strider featured on the cover of a 2010 issue of ARTnews, for an article by Kim Levin titled “Where Are the Great Women Pop Artists?”) And her acclaim will likely only continue to grow thanks to the support of Gmurzynska, who has recently placed works by Strider in major US museums.

Strider’s version of Pop art is one that looks at popular culture, of course, but abstracts it in a way that still feels fresh some 60 years later. At the center of the smaller location’s half is a section dedicated to Strider’s depictions of the bikini, which carried the “double-edge sword” of freeing women from modest dress and also “changed the expectations for women,” in particular for their bodies, according to the wall text.

Two similar pieces show details of women wearing bikinis that look more like hard-edge abstractions than figurative pieces, and a third work focuses on Ursula Andress, the actress who popularized the bikini in her role as a Bond girl in Dr. No and came to hate that association. In Bond Girl (2010), a version of Andress’s torso in a white bikini is seen through an oculus meant to mimic the Bond films barrel gun opening sequence. But, what makes this work superb, along with others like it, is that Strider resisted the flat canvas, preferring to make weighty shaped ones that jut at least a foot off the wall.

She would continue this exploration with foam works, several of which are on view in the space’s second gallery. Made from the foam used to insulate homes, Strider was able to dye and manipulate the medium into inventive and interesting ways. Several of these works have never been exhibited before.

Paradeplatz 2, 8001 Zurich and Talstrasse 37, 8001 Zurich, through September 1.

Tschabalala Self at Galerie Eva Presenhuber

For nearly a decade, Tschabalala Self has established herself as of one today’s leading artists by turning inventive canvases made of sewn and sutured fabric and painted elements into daring portraits. Recently, she has expanded her practice to include sculptural elements. Both modes are on view in this wonderful show, which opens with Seated Woman 1 (2023) a bronze work for a Black woman in a red dress seated on a green chair, which rests on a rounded dais of black-and-white tile. This is set against a red-white-and-yellow plaid wall.

It’s an alluring invitation to see various scenes of Black people on view inside. In one you see a couple waltzing, the man’s left leg extended to the fullest reach of the canvas, while in another a different couple leisure about in chairs. My favorite, however, is Transformation (2023) in which a figure seems to meld into the furniture, her legs becoming one with a chaise lounge and her head transfiguring into a lampshade. It feels like an apt metaphor for the artist’s own journey, both artistically (entering into a sculptural mode) and physically (she recently relocated her studio from New Haven to Catskill, New York).

Waldmannstrasse 6, 8001 Zurich, through July 22.

Marłgorzata Mirga-Tas at Karma International

Another artist working with textiles to create moving portraits is Marłgorzata Mirga-Tas, whose work took over the Polish Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Titled “Some Roma Histories,” the works on view are part of Mirga-Tas’s larger aim to depict her family and other members of the Roma community to dispel the stereotypes that have long marginalized Europe’s largest ethnic minority of around 12 million people. As with several other artists working with textiles, many of these fabrics carry their own personal histories, often garments once worn by the sitters. (Her mother is fond of saying “Shall I give this skirt to someone, or do you want it for your patchwork?”)

The small exhibition space is dominated by two large-scale works, suspended from the ceiling, that show Mirga-Tas’s technical prowess. But it is the smaller pieces on view that really shine. In one, set against a deep blue background, we see a woman gazing at three other women who gather around a table, at work and deep in conversation. The piece is made more tactile with a section of lace that acts as a large window and smattering of small white feathers that give it an ethereal quality.

Weststrasse 75, 8003 Zurich, through July 15.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Galerie Peter Kilchmann

Galerie Peter Kilchmann has on view new work by Los Angeles–based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya, whose “PUSH/PULL” is the latest addition to his well-known ongoing series “DAYLIGHT STUDIO / DARK ROOM STUDIO” (begun in 2021). As with past works, Sepuya presents various studio portraits, that, of course, aren’t really studio portraits. His aim all along has been to subvert that model, making visible the various tools that comprise a photography studio: light stands, backdrops, sandbags, printed test shots, mood boards, and the camera on its tripod. Each iteration feels as fresh as the first or the previous one, the nudity and sex acts depicted becoming more and more intimate and tender.  In this installation, four large-scale printed images are mounted onto wooden structures (behind some are smaller framed images tucked into corners). All in all, Sepuya continues to be at the top of his game.

Zahnradstrasse 21, 8005 Zurich, through July 28.

Chiharu Shiota at Museum Haus Konstruktiv

In the past few years, I’ve encountered the work of Chiharu Shiota at medium-scale, sculptural works made of thousands of red threads that crisscross each other and often contain various elements. So, it was quite extraordinary to witness the artist’s latest installation at the Haus Konstruktiv, which takes over the entirety of the ground-floor gallery. The room is, as per usual, covered with red threads that descend from the ceiling, with a small circular path carved out for the visitors. Suspended from these threads are hundreds of eyeglasses (all previously worn), giving the threads almost a tendril, optical nerve–like quality.

“We can never really understand another person,” Shiota says in a wall text. “It is fascinating to me how different people perceive things. There is this saying that you only see what you know. The same sentence can be interpreted so differently by people based on their previous experiences.”

Upstairs are a grouping of others work by the artist, including the 2022 corner installation Out of my Body, comprised of cowhide and goatskin that has been dyed red and a pair of bronze feet on the floor. This work is a departure from the red-thread installation for Shiota, due in part from a recent second cancer diagnosis that left the artist wanting to create objects with more permanence.

“When I was informed that my cancer had returned, the ground fell beneath my feet,” she says. “In the hospital, my body was not my body anymore, my body was handed through a system, broken apart, and put back together until I was whole again. … But death is not a limitation of our existence of memory. It belongs to the cycle of life as a new state of being.”

Selnaustrasse 25, 8001 Zurich, through September 10.

Cindy Sherman at Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman is best-known for her self-portraits, which over the years have become increasingly veiled. Her breakthrough series, “Untitled Film Stills,” shows Sherman as various characters in imagined films, while more recent ones show her using make-up to alter her visage into a clown, older versions of herself, subjects of famous historical paintings, and more. Her latest series, debuting here at Hauser & Wirth, consists of portraits that have been collaged together digitally, creating slightly discomfiting, Cubist-like images. (They also seem to draw elements from artists known for collaging images together like Romare Bearden and Deborah Roberts.) The majority are in black-and-white, though some passages are collaged with color images, further disturbing the picture plane. Unlike with past series, Sherman has made each portrait a close-up of the sitter’s face to further highlight the distortions that have occurred via the digital manipulation. The women shown here (Sherman as both herself and not, it seems) are fractured. Read into that what you will.

Löwenbräukunst, Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich, through September 16.

John Baldessari at Mai 36 Galerie

For its first solo show for John Baldessari since the influential artist’s passing in January 2020, Mai 36 Galerie has brought together a grouping of works from across Baldessari’s career, spanning from 1970 until 2019. Titled “FOOD,” the show looks at Baldessari’s own fascination with what we consume, a recurring topic in his work. The earliest of these is Cremation Project Corpus Wafers (Extra Components). At first glance the work is quite simple—and quite different from the text-based works for which Baldessari is best-known—consisting of just a few cookies in a sealed glass jar. But these are no ordinary cookies, their main ingredients are the ashes of Baldessari paintings from 1953 to 1966 that he had burned. The phoenix rises from the ashes in a conceptual act of defiance. 

Several more recent text-based pieces are also on view here, like an image of a cow paired with the text (also the 2017 artwork’s title): INT. PRODUCTION STUDIO -DAY / BRIMANDA / (INDISTINGUISHABLE / I CAN’T. Or, an almost empty canvas with a gray half-arc and gray smear: The Space Between Banana and Hand (2019). My favorite, however, might be the 13-part documentation of a Conceptual game titled Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Asparagus, from 1971–72, in which a person was selected to choose an asparagus from a group of three. A finger, pointing at the selected asparagus, is visible in each frame. The two unselected stems would be discarded and replaced with two new ones, and so forth.

Rämistrasse 37, 8001 Zurich, through August 12.