Peter Kilchmann

The gallery is delighted to present Pinochiette dans les Alpes, a group show bringing together 19 distinctive artistic voices in a rich and varied exploration of contemporary painting. Taking its title from a painting by Valérie Favre presented in the exhibition, Pinochiette dans les Alpes also pays tribute to the gallery’s origins and its enduring ties to Switzerland. Primarily drawn from the gallery’s programme, these artists offer a broader perspective on its diversity and artistic direction. The exhibition provides a unique opportunity to discover a wider selection of artists represented by the gallery, alongside invited artists, including several who have never before been exhibited in France. The exhibition will feature contributions by Francis Alÿs, Hernan Bas, Armin Boehm, Travis Boyer, Andriu Deplazes, Valérie Favre, Beatriz González, Christoph Hänsli, Chris Huen, Leiko Ikemura, See Hyun Lee, Eva Nielsen, Amol K Patil, Bernd Ribbeck, Valentin Rilliet, Dagoberto Rodríguez, Tobias Spichtig, Christine Streuli, and Didier William. The exhibition runs through October 10, 2026.

Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present East Is Everywhere, the first solo exhibition in France and the second with the gallery by Ishita Chakraborty (born in 1989 in West Bengal, India; lives and works between Switzerland and India). Her works address subjects such as climate migration, ecofeminism, and the shifting relationships between the Global South and the Global North within post-migratory societies. By “East,” the artist refers to marginalized communities across the globe - from Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa - which share a common history shaped by colonialism and extractive practices. The idea that “East Is Everywhere” thus points to a global phenomenon of circulation: the circulation of plants, bodies, images, and capital, but also the circulation of the systems of domination that emerge from them and continue to structure contemporary power relations. This reading materializes through a body of works in which landscape - understood as territory, memory, and political space - becomes a central motif. Through works specially conceived for the exhibition — including botanical illustrations painted in acrylic on canvas mounted on saree fabric from the Where the Wild Things Roam series, works on paper inspired by colonial-era maps from the I Recall the Forest Inside Me series, a monumental charcoal wall drawing, as well as several sculptural installations in unglazed or hand-painted porcelain— the artist examines how botanical circulation, land exploitation, and systems of labour have become deeply intertwined within colonial economies. Her work thus sheds light on these entangled histories of extraction and power, inscribed simultaneously within bodies and landscapes.

Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present Side by Side, a new solo exhibition by Swiss artist Marc Bauer. Bringing together new works on paper and canvas, wall paintings, and a specially commissioned soundtrack, the exhibition explores friendship, intimacy, desire, and queer life through a dialogue between historical archives and contemporary experience. Closely connected to Bauer’s current solo presentation Fear Rage Desire, Still Standing at Kunstmuseum Basel, Side by Side draws on archival material from Der Kreis —the influential Zurich-based magazine and cultural association that played a central role in the international movement for homosexual emancipation—as well as literary references and personal imagery. Through these sources, Bauer examines how experiences of friendship, community, and belonging are shaped across time. Throughout the different rooms, portraits, scenes of friendship, intimate studies of hands, and references to queer club culture appear alongside archival and literary material. New wall paintings created in collaboration with Samuel Obst and a soundtrack developed by Berlin-based artists Sin Maldita (Tim Roth) and Philipp Hülsenbeck extend the show beyond the frame of the drawing, creating an immersive environment that reflects on the social and cultural spaces in which queer identities have been formed and expressed. The exhibition is on view through July 24, 2026.

Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present Handspiele (Hand Games), Francis Alÿs’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and the first dedicated specifically to his animations. The exhibition brings together seven new animations alongside paintings, drawings, installations, and a comprehensive presentation of publications spanning the artist’s career. Closely connected to Alÿs’s celebrated Children’s Games series (1999–present), Handspiele focuses on one of the most elementary and universally shared forms of play: hand games. Created through hundreds of hand-drawn pencil images, the animations distill familiar gestures into carefully choreographed movements of hands, exploring play as a form of communication, interaction, and social exchange. While the Children’s Games videos document children at play in public spaces around the world, the animations isolate these actions and reduce them to their most fundamental gestures. Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Antwerp, Belgium) lives and works in Mexico City. His work has been presented at international institutions such as the Barbican Centre (London, UK), Tate Modern (London, UK), MoMA (New York, USA), and in major international exhibitions, including Documenta and the Venice Biennale. In 2022, he represented Belgium at the 59th Venice Biennale with The Nature of the Game, a large-scale presentation of his ongoing Children’s Games project. By bringing together recent animations alongside recent works on canvas, Handspiele offers a focused overview of recurring themes in Alÿs’s practice and highlights the central role that play has occupied throughout his work.

April 24, 6:30 pm: Book launch & exhibition walk-through with Amol K Patil and curator Amila Puzić (Röda Sten Konsthall) Galerie Peter Kilchmann is proud to present The Shadow of Lustre, Amol K Patil’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland. Bringing together sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and immersive installation, the exhibition unfolds as a powerful meditation on labor, migration, and visibility—illuminated through Patil’s distinctive poetic use of light and darkness. Developed in collaboration with Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, this new chapter of The Shadow of Lustre focuses on the lived experiences of Dalit communities who migrated from rural India to the working-class neighborhoods of Mumbai. Patil draws from the architecture and social life of the city’s historic chawls, transforming fragments of bodies, movement, sound, and material memory into works of striking emotional and political resonance. Amol K Patil (1987) lives and works between Mumbai, India, and Amsterdam, Netherlands. His work has been presented at leading international institutions and exhibitions, including Documenta Fifteen (Kassel, Germany), the Berlin Biennale (Berlin, Germany), Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, South Korea), Röda Sten Konsthall (Gothenburg, Sweden), Hayward Gallery (London, England), De Pont Museum (Tilburg, Netherlands), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (Kochi, India), and SITE Santa Fe International (Santa Fe, USA), among others. His practice stands out for its rare ability to merge conceptual rigor with lived history, performance, and collective memory. The Shadow of Lustre positions Patil as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary art today—an artist who makes visible what is too often left in the shadows.

For his very first exhibition in France, presented in the Parisian space of Galerie Peter Kilchmann, La Cloche dans la forêt offers an opportunity to introduce the work of Uwe Wittwer, a major artist of his generation who remains little known to the French public. The exhibition brings together a selection of oil paintings and watercolors based on works by great French masters such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Nicolas Poussin. The artist also continues several earlier series exploring themes characteristic of his work: historical events, ruins, portraits, and group scenes.

Christoph Hänsli, Erledigt January 24 – March 14, 2026 Vernissage: Friday, January 23, 6–8 pm Rämistrasse 33, Zurich Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present Erledigt, the second solo exhibition by Swiss artist Christoph Hänsli (*1963, Zurich, where he lives and works) at its Rämistrasse location. The exhibition brings together new small- and medium-format paintings from 2024 and 2025, executed in acrylic on canvas or MDF. Hänsli is known for his figurative paintings of found or collected everyday objects, rendered at a 1:1 scale. Often overlooked or considered insignificant, these objects are approached with quiet attention and subtle, understated humour. Through painting, Hänsli shifts them from the realm of use into that of contemplation, granting them a new presence and an unexpected dignity. At the centre of Erledigt is a new series of painted lists: crossed-out or checked-off to-do lists, order notes, and handwritten reminders. Familiar tools of daily organisation, these lists usually serve a practical purpose before quickly being discarded or forgotten. Hänsli depicts them at the moment they have lost their function, transforming them into poetic and sensuous images. In doing so, he invites a transition from reading to looking, from utility to reflection. Human figures are largely absent in these works, yet their presence is strongly felt through traces—handwriting, markings, erasures, and layers of paint. Hänsli’s paintings are built up through multiple strata, from background to foreground, making visible a sequence of moments that all belong to the past. Tasks, words, or notes are often heavily crossed out, gradually dissolving into abstraction. What remains are rhythms, forms, and patterns that leave viewers wondering what was once written and what has already been forgotten. Alongside the list paintings, Erledigt includes works that revisit recurring motifs in Hänsli’s oeuvre: language and typography, residues and leftovers, closed surfaces that conceal what lies behind them. Throughout the exhibition, a tension unfolds between presence and absence, completion and disappearance, meaning and loss. Hänsli’s characteristic serious humour approaches these themes with care and restraint, revealing the quiet absurdities embedded in everyday life. With Erledigt, Christoph Hänsli opens a contemplative space in which ordinary human traces are given renewed attention. In an increasingly fast-paced and noisy world, the exhibition proposes a slower mode of seeing—one that allows for stillness, recognition, and a sense of belonging.

Galerie Peter Kilchmann is delighted to present the sixth solo exhibition devoted to Melanie Smith (b. 1965 in Poole, UK; lives and works in Mexico). An Age of Liberty When the World Had Been Possible marks two decades of collaboration with the artist and will be shown for the very first time at the gallery’s Paris location. A multidisciplinary artist whose exhibitions consistently explore drawing, painting, performative film, and installation, Smith enjoys drawing from the vast fields of painting and art history, intertwining them with moving images. In her most recent works, the artist examines the impact of extractivism on specific ecosystems and environments in Latin America. Her research, almost anthropological in nature, leads her to observe territories under multiple threats: whether it is the disappearance of certain species or the uses and traditions that developed in their presence. Smith simultaneously reveals and affirms how a territory is a space of fragile balance and how the conditions of existence of all the species that inhabit it— human, animal, or plant— can either guarantee or prevent flourishing and enrichment.

toujours là (prehesion of the distant past) and inversion (miroir bohème) face one another. The use of transparent glass and a mirror evokes the bathroom, a common yet intimate place where one lays oneself bare. Watching my reflection in the small rectangular mirror, I remember all the bathrooms in this city where I told people I loved them for the first time. There must have been something strange in the air that day. In my memory, it was a feeling of safety, of certainty, that I have only felt intermittently, and that the city seems to have taken away from me now. M. tells me that when he conceived this piece, he could see his face taking on the shape of a warehouse, from spending so many nights there. He tells me it is not the first time his face has merged with a building in which he has spent time. Self-Observing-Paris.

This exhibition at the ALBERTINA presents a cross-section of the oeuvre of Leiko Ikemura (*1951 in Tsu, Japan). Known for poetically powerful works in which she unites Western and Eastern influences, this Japanese-Swiss artist devotes herself to themes such as femininity, transformation, and identity. Ikemura translates the fragility and mystery of human existence into images at once universal and deeply personal. Her oeuvre stands out for its surrealist visual language and ranges from luminous paintings to reduced drawings and on to sculptures done in glazed terracotta, glass, and bronze. A central aspect of her output is the close linkage of humankind and nature, expressed not only in the melding of body and landscape but also via the inclusion of hybrid beings.

Aus Anlass des 35-jährigen Bestehen der Kunstzeitschrift TEXTE ZUR KUNST, freut sich die Galerie Peter Kilchmann das neue Jahr mit der Ausstellung 35 Years of TEXTE ZUR KUNST: There Is No Art Without Criticism zu eröffnen. Eine Auswahl von Kunsteditionen der letzten Jahre werden zu sehen sein.