Bright Lights and Night Swimming

Pipilotti Rist Robert Indiana Katherina Grosse Karl Moser Katherina Grosse Jutta Koether Andro Wekua The Appendix: Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Pipilotti Rist, and Paul H-O

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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 Eastman—she 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 Gallery’s 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 Moser–designed Kunsthaus Zürich, where the Romanian artist Mircea Cantor’s 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 Indiana’s 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.