Katherine Bernhardt, A.R. Penck, and Man Ray feature in the exhibitions on view

Adam Jasper

Seven must-see shows across Switzerland, from Lake Geneva to St. Moritz

Presently on view in Switzerland is an exceptional range of thoroughly researched exhibitions, as postponed and long-planned shows open in quick succession following delays due to the pandemic. Here are seven very different gallery exhibitions across the country that are worth the travel.

A.R. Penck Galerie Knoell, Basel Through October 30, 2021Like many artists active in the East German underground,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8312/A-R-Penck">A.R. Penck</a> (born Ralf Winkler in 1939) worked under a number of pseudonyms, including Mike Hammer and Mickey Spilane. The nicknames are taken from hardboiled detective novels, and this fits Penck, who spent much of his youth – from the moment he founded the breakaway artists group Erste Phalanx Nedserd (the last word is ‘Dresden’ spelled backwards) – on the run from the authorities.As a late expressionist, a political dissident, and a key figure of the Neue Deutsche Malerei, A.R. Penck is a name that critics love to drop, but they always do so in shifting contexts: alongside&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6734/Jean-Dubuffet">Jean Dubuffet</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8311/Markus-Lüpertz">Markus Lüpertz</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/11104/Philip-Guston">Philip Guston</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6938/Louise-Bourgeois">Louise Bourgeois</a>. The difficulty in firmly pigeonholing him is something he would have appreciated; Penck’s energetic abstract works can be read as diagrams of social structures. Most of the works on display at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/5452/Galerie-Knoell">Galerie Knoell</a> are maquettes and expressionist canvases spanning nearly 40 years. Particularly worth looking out for is a significant work made over a decade before Penck was able to leave East Germany: Ohne Titel (AB) (1960/70).&nbsp;

‘Silence’ Pace, Geneva Through October 30, 2021<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1242/Pace-Gallery">Pace</a>’s group shows often have the scale and consequentiality of museum events, and the current show at the gallery’s Geneva space is no exception. ‘Silence’ features works by five artists who explore the relationship between the body, landscape, and temporality. The sculptor and philosopher&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7226/Lee-Ufan">Lee Ufan</a>’s Relatum – expansion piece (2008) places stones (embodiments of presence, as he likes to say) in spatial relationships defined by almost typographic curves of steel.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7267/Andreas-Eriksson">Andreas Eriksson</a> likewise makes his forms articulate through careful juxtaposition. He carefully counters blocks of secondary color against each other to make radiant prose poems in paint. If Eriksson’s landscapes glow, Marina Perez Simão’s paintings positively pulse. Where Simão refers to the ocean and the tropics, Brice Guilbert’s canvases look inland and up, to the volcano as a generative, animate mountain at the center of memory. All these works explore landscape, memory, and sensation, eschewing the human figure in favor of the mute landscape.The show also presents a new framework for interpreting the work of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/19507/Jean-Paul-Riopelle">Jean-Paul Riopelle</a>, whose paintings, made with the palette knife rather than brush, show how paint can be cut into sculptural forms. Seen in the context of these phenomenological works, Riopelle’s Nouvelles impressions n°15 (1978) becomes about the pleasures of looking, rather than the contests of discourse.

Ju Ting, ‘When the Wind Comes’ Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne Through October 29, 2021In synchrony with the phenomenological works on view at Pace,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1404/Galerie-Urs-Meile">Galerie Urs Meile</a> is showing significant works in which material takes priority over concept.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/17552/Ju-Ting">Ju Ting</a> lays down paint like a river lays down sediment: layer after layer, like a geological process. Analogously, other works are made by a process of accumulation and tearing. In all her pieces, one can see her rigorous training in printmaking taken to innovative extremes. However, it is perhaps the works in the ‘Coral’ series (2020–21) that characterize her new aesthetic concerns best. Here, torn strips of acrylic are piled and intertwined, accumulating like a reef on grey industrial bricks. Over this, additional thick layers of paint have been poured. The work, and the name, unavoidably call up associations with the formation of coral atolls, whose natural history remained a mystery until Charles Darwin suggested their origins in microscopic life. Works from ‘Coral’ are joined by pieces from two other ongoing series, ‘Pearl’ and ‘Untitled’, in this show, which is Ting’s second at the gallery’s Lucerne location.

‘Women – Merz, Dumas, Mutu, Joffe, Henrot, Gertsch, Bernhardt, Kruglyanskaya, Muslimova, Tabouret, Self, Weaver’ <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2329/Monica-De-Cardenas">Monica De Cardenas</a>, Lugano Through October 30, 2021This sprawling, generous, and ultimately affirming group show of works by 12 women includes both historically lauded 20th-century artists such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/11460/Marisa-Merz">Marisa Merz</a>, one of the drivers of Arte Povera, and young contemporary artists such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/20763/Tschabalala-Self">Tschabalala Self</a>, who often uses sewing and cutting techniques to create vivid collages of bodies, presented not as products but as felt realities. Also featuring works by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8901/Marlene-Dumas">Marlene Dumas</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8445/Wangechi-Mutu">Wangechi Mutu</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7005/Chantal-Joffe">Chantal Joffe</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7870/Camille-Henrot">Camille Henrot</a>, Silvia Gertsch,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/20848/Katherine-Bernhardt">Katherine Bernhardt</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/13252/Ella-Kruglyanskaya">Ella Kruglyanskaya</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/30839/Ebecho-Muslimova">Ebecho Muslimova</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/21899/Claire-Tabouret">Claire Tabouret</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/35051/Grace-Weaver">Grace Weaver</a>, the exhibition manages to set the artists in a conversation that emphasizes the diversity of their positions, rather than merely their shared sex.

Young-Jae Lee, ‘Vessels’ <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1149/Galerie-Karsten-Greve">Galerie Karsten Greve</a>, St. Moritz Through October 30, 2021Young-Jae Lee is credited with bringing the production of Korean ceramics to central Europe through her decades of commitment to the Keramische Werkstatt Margaretenhöhe in Essen, Germany. Inspired equally by the austere works of the Joseon dynasty and by the Bauhaus, Lee makes works of great refinement that synthesize both the distinct cultural strands at their origin, and the problems of repetition and chance that characterize the aesthetics of ceramics. In distinction to her earlier series, Lee here presents new ceramic ‘vessels’ (cups, bowls, vases) in colors that intended to evoke spring – lush greens and yellows suggestive of the reopening of the individual after the long confinements of the previous two years.

‘Man Ray, Works 1940 - 1970’ Larkin Erdmann, Zurich September 17 – November 12, 2021<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/23551/Larkin-Erdmann-Gallery">Larkin Erdmann</a> is both an art dealer and a historian, and the interest in rigor is palpable in his exhibitions. This show focuses on the later, more neglected works of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7171/Man-Ray">Man Ray</a>, who continued to experiment with novel image generation techniques throughout his practice. The 1965 work Suspense, whose central motif was made by pressing acrylic between two plates and removing one before the paint had dried, characterizes Ray’s ongoing interest in the possibilities of automatic painting, Surrealism, and the Rorschach test as means of revealing the latent agency of the material. As Ray wrote in his autobiography, ‘The results were astonishing, with details that could have been obtained only through long and meticulous labor by hand.’

Andrea Büttner, ‘Triebe’ <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1551/Galerie-Tschudi">Galerie Tschudi</a>, Zuoz Through September 25, 2021<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7123/Andrea-Büttner">Andrea Büttner</a>’s extraordinary research-driven show ‘Triebe’ (German for ‘shoots’ or ‘spears’, but also ‘drives’) manages, through its tightness of focus, to present a strong reprove to our collective fetishization of craft. Büttner studied the white asparagus harvest in Brandenburg, Germany, in 2021. During the asparagus harvest, workers gently free the asparagus tips from the soil, cutting the stem of the plant some 20 centimeters below the surface of the soil. The work must be carried out stooped. The harvest lasts some 10 weeks. Sketching the workers, Büttner also turned to examining the history of the depiction of people in backbreaking labor in art.Reflecting on the suffering given in exchange for this bitter vegetable, Büttner commissioned woodcarving students to produce 143 copies of asparagus shoots in pale wood. The monotony and precision of the craft functions as a meditation on the labor of others. Büttner sets the works against a video – What is so terrible about craft? / Die Produkte der menschlichen Hand (2019) – containing an interview with a sister of the Communaute de Jerusalem, whose order produced handmade sandals for the twee high-end retail store Manufactum, and who soon found herself working in the store, habit and all.Adam Jasper is a writer and researcher living in Zurich. He recently co-edited the book Retail Apocalypse with Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen (gta verlag 2021).Top image: Grace Weaver, Out to lunch, 2017 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Monica de Cardenas, Lugano.

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