All-weekend opening during Zurich Art Weekend 2025:
Friday, 11 am – 9 pm; Saturday, 11 am – 8 pm; Sunday, 11 am – 6 pm

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present the group show Wall Works & Sculptures, showcasing works by Doug Aitken, Jean-Marie Appriou, Angela Bulloch, Sylvie Fleury, Liam Gillick, John Giorno, Douglas Gordon, Yu Ji, Adam Pendleton, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Ugo Rondinone, and Steven Shearer.

Beginning in the 1990s, artist and filmmaker Doug Aitken (b. 1968 in Redondo Beach, CA, US) has developed a boundary-defying multimedia oeuvre that both studies and leads into new art forms. Integrating film, sound, photography, sculpture, performance, happenings, and site-specific installations, Aitken’s immersive multimedia landscapes disrupt the conventions of the contemporary art world.

Jean-Marie Appriou’s (b. 1986 in Brest, FR) sculptures evoke archaic forms and are inspired by contemporary but also mythological and futuristic worlds. His works are often crafted from aluminium and bronze, the design possibilities of which the artist furthers through experimentation with finishes and in combination with other materials, including blown glass. By alluding to familiar forms, be they animal or human, and developing his unique, almost alchemical approach to his source material, Appriou has created his very own mythology.

Angela Bulloch (b. 1966, Rainy River, Canada) explores the interplay of systems, patterns, and rules, engaging deeply with the history of form and modes of human interaction. Her work navigates the threshold between the digital and the analogue, the virtual and the real, often blurring these distinctions with striking effect. In her sculptures and installations, Bulloch merges a fascination with geometric logic and serial structures with a strong visual language. The sculpture Heavy Metal Stack Pink West (2015) and the wall painting R U Black Red Rhombus? (2025) evoke a sense of animated illusion, as if existing in a digital realm. Their irregular angles disrupt the viewer’s perception, challenging the brain’s innate expectation of symmetry and stability. As one moves around the works, their forms seem to shift and morph, emphasizing the fluid relationship between perspective and perception.

Sylvie Fleury’s (b. 1961 in Geneva, CH) artistic practice has been exploring the intersections between art, fashion, beauty, pop culture, motorsports and science fiction since the early 1990s. She utilizes the unmistakable visual language of these arenas and draws on their aesthetics and phenomena to examine desire in all its forms, while also radically questioning the paradigms of art history and its male-dominated canon of modernism. With the large-scale wall painting Égoïste (1993), she references the lettering of Chanel’s Égoïste Pour Homme fragrance. She examines the brand’s portrayal of egoism as a seductive masculine trait. By isolating the logo from its original context, Fleury highlights its ambiguity—turning it into either an insult or a self-obsession. Fleury explores the creation of identity and a question that resurfaces throughout her work: how do we define ourselves? As is so often the case, she chooses a trenchant motif that allows viewers to find their own answers.

Liam Gillick (b. 1964 in Aylesbury, UK) is known for work that deploys multiple forms to expose political control systems. Gillick’s work exposes the dysfunctional aspects of a modernist legacy in terms of abstraction and architecture when framed within a globalized, neo-liberal consensus. His work extends into structural rethinking of the exhibition as a form. Gillick has also been a prolific writer and critic of contemporary art. Throughout this time he has extended his practice into experimental venues and collaborative conceptual projects with artists including Philippe Parreno, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Lawler, and the band New Order. For example, his elegant, powder-coated aluminum structure Scorpion when Felix (2012) overlaps his wall-text Every Drink Available In The Bar (2001). This stark juxtaposition of two different works blends into the exhibition space rather than opposing it. It evokes the layered associations of transitory spaces, theatricality, and interpretation, hallmarks of Gillick's artistic practice.

John Giorno (1936–2019, New York, NY, US) work targets a broad audience, redefining the capabilities of linguistic forms at the crossroads of poetry, visual art, music, and performance. He is recognized as a pioneer in the field of performance poetry and spoken word, as well as a major activist for AIDS awareness, LGBTQ+ rights, and anti-war struggles. Giorno’s relationships with artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg profoundly influenced his work and encouraged him to bring poetry off the printed page and into visual, musical, and political realms. No other artist has woven poetry, visual art, sound performance, and dance as succinctly as Giorno did, while radically questioning their boundaries and interdependencies.

Douglas Gordon (b. 1966 in Glasgow, UK) is renowned for his exploration of cinema and images drawn from collective memory and everyday culture. His multidisciplinary work spans film, photography, performance, sculptural installation, and conceptual text. Gordon examines and reconfigures images from contemporary culture to reveal fundamental patterns of perception. By incorporating literature, folklore, iconic Hollywood films, as well as his own footage, drawings, and writings, he manipulates time and language to disorient and provoke. Through this approach, he delves into moral and ethical questions, mental and physical states, and the concepts of collective memory and selfhood.

Creating her own language, Yu Ji (b. 1985, Shanghai, CN) enlivens her visual sentences with a rich vocabulary rooted in form, objects, humanity and the everyday. Her work, that spans installation, video and performance, exists as a series of interventions, both into space and creating it, taking medium and materiality as a starting point. Running throughout Yu Ji’s sculptural work is an acknowledgement of the body. The cast of a limb, the outline of a body part – Yu Ji creates sensitive yet weighty anatomical and amorphous objects that evoke a sense of eery mechanical disengagement, as if an alter human had been created then pilfered.

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984 in Richmond, VA, US) is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. His visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings begin on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These compositions are photographed and then layered using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing, and photography. An encounter with any single work brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry.

Gerwald Rockenschaub (b. 1952 in Linz, AT) works within a formal repertoire that he began developing in the 1980s when he was a central figure in the emerging “neo-geo” (neo-geometric conceptualism) movement. Uniquely influenced by his work as a techno DJ and composer of electronic music, Rockenschaub absorbs the everyday imagery and forms of logos, traffic signs, and pictograms to produce sculptures, wall installations, and animations that render an aura of hyperrealist perfection. 

Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964 in Brunnen, CH) is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations on nature and the human condition while establishing an organic formal vocabulary that fuses a variety of sculptural and painterly traditions. The breadth and generosity of his vision of human nature have resulted in a wide range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects, installations, videos, and performances. His hybridized forms, which borrow from ancient and modern cultural sources alike, exude pathos and humor, going straight to the heart of the most pressing issues of our time, where modernist achievement and archaic expression intersect.

Steven Shearer (b. 1968 in New Westminster, CA) has worked with a wide range of materials including, print, sculpture, painting, drawing, and collaged found photography. The exhibited Poems XXIV (2008) are conté drawings of white, sans-serif capital letters on a black background. They are produced in much the same way as his other works, stemming from an active use of the Internet and a system of classification and sifting as the first stage of the process. Each selected phrase is an edit from a series of websites specializing in cataloging the various subdivisions of metal music from around the world. Shearer sets rules typical of modernist practice in his use of repetition, as each line is used only twice as the series unfolds, in an ever-increasing number of poems.

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