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The Swiss summer may have been flaunting its last bit of tangibly tropical heat in Zürich last week, when its vaunted galleries and museums sprung open their doors for the season opening of their first-of-fall shows. For three long, antic nights—August 26, 27, and 28—the city’s art spaces put on their late-summer finest, with exhibitions that included a huge Pipilotti Rist show in various shades of shocking pink (Hauser & Wirth), an Andro Wekua exhibition in his regularly darker blood-red palette (Peter Kilchmann), a gold-rush-evoking mini-survey of John Miller (Kunsthalle Zürich), and a show of sculptural and video works, in ever-whiter shades of pale, by Mircea Cantor (Kunsthaus Zürich).

Following the throng of exhibitions came the parties—at private villas, along Lake Zürich, in collector’s homes nestled in the hills, and in the vast courtyard of the old Löwenbräu Brewery (now an art complex for Zürich’s more blue-chip galleries), which held a blowout Sommerfest on Friday night. And after the parties came not the hotel lobby but the lake, where it seemed almost everyone (this writer included) enjoyed some night swimming before falling off drowsily into bed.

Such swims were inevitable, as the city of Zürich is built around the brilliant body of water that, along with two rivers, divides it into sections. This topography can be used as an organizing principle, with each of the three nights centered on a different gallery neighborhood or two. The inaugural evening, on Wednesday, featured galleries like Haas & Fischer, Claudia Groeflin, and Mark Müller that are mostly situated above the Sihl River. At the latter space, Katherina Grosse presented “the greedy I,” an exhibition of her reliably vibrant paintings. These included a series of airbrush-y, acrylic-on-soil works that evoked a natural world etched with acid and ’80s-era graffiti; the standout was a planetary, disc-shaped untitled work (2008).

Just across the Sihl at Claudia Groeflin Galerie, the talented young artist Anne Eastmanshe of the circular mirror mobiles and dreamy video works—presented The Intention of the Device (2009), a spooky new video featuring a room of the Yale University Art Gallerys African art collection hung with slowly rotating mirrors reflecting bits of masks and maps (the artist, not surprisingly, has a degree in cultural anthropology). Also of note was a show at Perla-Mode, with works by Zürich’s Kerim Seiler and German artist Oliver Ross, and an installation by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota at Rotwand, where a dense filigree of black wool thread evoked a gothic nest. After the openings, a party in nearby Helvetiaplatz commenced, wine and food flowed, and the mood was clearly anticipatory for the bigger days to come.

Thursday night featured a much more sprawling crowd of galleries and museums spread out on both sides of Lake Zürich and the Limmat River. We began the evening at Karma International, where Berlin-based artist Agnieszka Brzezanska was showing a new series of works. Mexican artist Martin Soto Climent milled about, as did curator Adam Szymczyk and local Swiss artists like Pamela Rosenkranz and Ana Roldán. We moved on up the hill to the Karl Moserdesigned Kunsthaus Zürich, where the Romanian artist Mircea Cantors show “Tracking Happiness” was on view. A sculpture that recalled an abacus strung with wooden spoons played mysterious counterpoint to a video featuring a round robin of women in long white dresses enigmatically (and rhythmically) sweeping an equally white room.

Fellow Romanian artist Daniel Knorr (in town for his exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel, opening September 20) roamed about before he and the crowd dispersed in order to see some of the 30-odd offerings on view around the city. Just down the street, the Canadian collaborative General Idea had taken over the small Mai 36 space with its sobering wallpaper riff on Robert Indianas seminal LOVE sculpture, which replaced the stacked letters L-O-V-E with A-I-D-S, as well as an “Infected” series of Mondrians, Duchamps, and Gerrit Rietvelds from the early ’90s. AA Bronson greeted well-wishers as they took in the brightly hued (if tragically themed) geometry of the installation. Meanwhile, across the lake, the young, L.A.-based artist Sarah Cain explored the limits of geometric abstraction in equally intriguing but far sunnier works on paper, at Seiler + Mosseri-Marlio.

After hitting a few more galleries, we jumped in the car and headed down the lake toward Küsnacht, where collector Damian Grieder runs Grieder Contemporary out of his palatial, thoroughly modern home. The house’s wide lawn was taken up with long tables and grilling when we arrived; just behind, on the first floor, a show of works by Berlin-based artist Gregor Hildebrandt was beautifully installed. The artist’s material of preference, the cassette tape, was everywhere in evidence: from a Robert Rymanlike “painting” made from a grid of cassettes, their visible spines painted a rough white, to an accordion-fold paper work featuring a thread of thin, iridescent black tape threaded through it. After a bit of food and drink on the grass outside, where we chatted with Art Basel Co-Director Marc Spiegler about summer hiking spots in the Alps, the evening ended back in Zürich proper, with dancing in the groundskeeping quarters of an old conserved villa, and, following that, a dip in the glistening black lake with a troupe of game gallerists and artists.

By Friday night, everyone was dragging a bit. But just a bit. After all, it was the last evening, and it centered on the illustrious streak of galleries along Limmatstrasse and in the Löwenbräu complex. On our way to the brewery, we saw crowds gathering outside Vanessa Billys much-heralded show at the promising young gallery BolteLang. Inside, Billy’s cool, cerebral works in various mediums—video, clay, plastic, concrete—explored the nature of water in its own various forms.

Further on, we entered the packed brewery, where our first stop was Pipilotti Rist’s florid, funny installation in Hauser & Wirth’s vast street-level space. Joining the cavalcade, we ventured up the narrow stairwell to a maze of galleries. Here the standout shows were Andro Wekua at Peter Kilchmann, with its evocative pair of tall, attenuated tables and various paintings; the small Marcus Coates rooms at the Kunsthalle, featuring a riotous video of the artist performing in Marilyn Monroe drag and animal pelts for a stunned Asian crowd; and the Migros Museums adept, perfectly conceived group show “Deterioration, They Said,” featuring the frenetically color-soaked YouTube-y generation of artists Cory Arcangel, Jessica Ciocci and Jacob Ciocci, Paper Rad, Shana Moulton, and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch. Far from a monotony of video monitors, the show featured a brilliant selection of sculptural works in which videos were deftly introduced. If the emphasis seemed more on color and furnishings than the identity politics so many of these artists grapple with, it is a minor fault in an otherwise dexterous show.

We eventually made our way back downstairs to an Oktoberfest-like party in the courtyard, where a seeming football field of long tables and bars had been set up and were overwhelmingly occupied by the jostling crowd, which included Swiss-based curators like Beatrix Ruf and Nikola Dietrich. After a brief sojourn upstairs a few hours later for a vigorous musical performance by avant-garde legend Tony Conrad and artists Jutta Koether and John Miller, and an after-party at the house of artist Fabian Marti and gallerist Karolina Dankow, it was time to call it a night—or morning. There would be no swimming this evening; sleep was far, far more coveted.