Switzerland's Emerging Art Scene

Ask anyone to name a Swiss artist and you’ll probably hear Giacometti, yet Switzerland is producing some of the most surprising art around today, much of it by young artists who treat their materials as problems to solve.

Most photographs want you to look straight through the paper, but Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah (b. 1990) won’t let you. She exposes light-sensitive paper in the gallery, crumples it and staples the torn sheets onto frames. What emerges is black and glossy, closer to painting than to print, with a face half-surfacing from the folds. It’s photography with a body, and a slightly unruly one at that.

Most painters buy their colours ready-made, but Guillaume Dénervaud (b. 1987, Fribourg) makes his own from plants, algae and minerals. Drawing on dystopian eco-fiction, he uses them to paint postcards from a future in which nature and industry have merged, so his imagined landscapes are quite literally made of the one we already have. The finished paintings feel oddly out of time, as though they had been found rather than made.

Deborah-Joyce Holman (b. 1991) has built a practice around refusal, declining to stick to a single medium, to accept neat labels or to make things easy. One of her works is a nine-hour 16mm film that asks what we owe an image. Another is a series of paintings based on film stills of the homes of fictional Black lesbian characters, quiet interiors that remind you how rarely characters like these appear on screen.

A generation that works with its hands

Different as they are, all three question their medium instead of simply using it, with Adu-Sanyah turning photographic paper into an object in its own right, Dénervaud mixing the planet into his paint and Holman asking what we owe an image and who gets to be seen. What connects them, in the end, is less a style than a shared curiosity about what things are made of.

Every June, young Swiss artists like these show their work in Basel, both at Art Basel and at the free Swiss Art Awards show next door. Next time you’re there, step away from the famous names for an hour and seek these three out!

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