Ascending the escalator at Palexpo, the partner and host of Art Genève 2025, the visitor is met with wide aisles, Eames lounge chairs galore, and a quirky ‘smoking section’ signalled by a giant pink Magritte pipe.
Yes, it is a fair. But it is also a mood — and a welcome aberration for this genre to have considered empty space and integrated rest areas as curatorial tools.
Comprising seven halls, 106,000 m² of exhibition space, and a short walking distance from the city’s airport, Palexpo feels like if Berlin’s Tempelhof hangars had been mysteriously airlifted, only to be jocosely reimagined as a Swiss convention centre.
Now in its 13th iteration, Art Genève was originally launched as a human-scaled alternative to its gargantuan second cousin in Basel. Since 2012 it has grown from a presentation of just 25 exhibitors to over three times as many. Having now capped the exhibitor number at 80, endured the pandemic, and weathered the sordid departure of its founding director Thomas Hug in 2024, this deliberately intimate fair and mother of Art Monte Carlo has shown its market mettle.
Despite referring to itself as a ‘salon’, the elevated production quality demonstrates how this Franco term has a somewhat more generic implication, without the kinds of frenetic, throw everything on the wall connotations the same word harbours in the Anglo realm.
With as much Parisian representation as Genevese, this year’s fair includes 67 commercial galleries tempered by 24 institutions; including private collections, foundations, and art schools. The crowd is French-leaning, embodying posh eccentricity and luxury of the understatement (though not without a fair bit of bling).
We moseyed around the joint and selected ten artworks worth seeing at the fair.
1 Matias Faldbakken, Locker Sculpture #03, 2011 The Cranford Collection
What curator Anne Pontegnie of the London-based private collection referred to as “a brutal assault on the banality of everyday life” proved all too true during the set-up of the fair. Over dinner, one of the exhibitors mentioned to me how, when she first saw the piece, she assumed that the metal storage unit had suffered some kind of shipping accident.
“Working in the field myself and dealing with logistics on a regular basis, I thought to myself, oh dear — not another container fiasco.” Considering the turnover rate at a convention centre and the potential for freight damage in the non-stop event production trade, it was easy to confuse the artwork for just another industry SNAFU.
Sometimes the most impactful art can be the one that doesn’t readily identify itself as such.
2 Man Ray, Ballet Français, 1956/1971 Larkin Erdmann
Ray loved a good pun. Especially an object pun, where meaning is found not only in the object but in its overlay with language. Executed in 1971, this is edition 2 of 10 artist’s proofs from the original piece from 1956. The title translates to “French ballet,” which, when spoken, sounds like balai français, or “French broom”.
Here the linguistic interaction connects gestures of sweeping with dancer-like movements; a choreographed reciprocation that reduces performative pretension to a domestic, widely accessible experience. A transformative ballet in itself.
3 Anne-Julie Raccoursier, Sit-in, 2014 FMAC Fonds d’Art contemporain de la Ville de Genève
A symphonic but silent exercise in perspective and moving image, this 34-minute colour video is situated somewhere between reality and spectacle. Sheep in the foreground are dwarfed by background satellite dishes in the background, almost mirroring them in parallel universes.
This play between rural, natural landscape imagery and the manmade parabolic antennas — designed to transmit information over vast distances — examines various meanings of the word “remote”. The video reminds us of the sparkling promises of globalisation as well as the unrestrained triumph of the entertainment society.
It is a key example of Raccoursier’s interrogation into superficial appearances of the present, and the exposition of various levels of social or cultural realities. In her work she consistently uses tools of repetition, masterful framing, and drawing upon her native Switzerland — invariably inviting the viewer to consider filmic space as an abstract room for reflection.
4 Birgit Jürgenssen, Housewife’s Kitchen Apron, 1975/2024 Galerie Hubert Winter
Playing with a literal manifestation of bun in the oven, Jügenssen blatantly mocks domestic captivity, gendered expectations of the female anatomy, and the shifting imagination of reproductive labour in the 1970s. Her face says it all: dry, punchy, and unapologetic.
But while the apron costume is worn allegorically, it looks eerily similar to outfits and contraptions that proceeded in more recent decades, such as mobile oyster shucking costumes sported by contracted waiters and waitresses for weddings or fancy receptions.
In this way, her visionary poetic statement has gone on to not only still be valid, but also to include all genders in the potential exploitation of the body as a vehicle of service.
5 Marc-Aurèle Debut, What are u into?, 2025 C-A-L-M Centre d’Art Le Meute
Both subtle and blatant, what was most impactful about this piece is the way it was installed. Mounted below (adult) eye-level, it forces the viewer to physically distort one’s own body in order to come face to face with the object. Then, the rest of the booth is left completely empty — its vacant walls creating, if not provoking, space for fantasy.
The viewer is afforded room to furnish their own exhibitionist narrative. After all, everyone’s into something, and Debut just wants to know what.
The London-based artist’s practice investigates cultural and psychological complexities of sexuality, with an overarching interrogation of the mind-body relationship.
6 Agnès Thurnauer, Big Big, 2025 Michel Rein
Thurnauer’s graphic visual languages examines the barometer of binary associations attached to cues like vague phalluses, lady lumps, and colours characteristic of trite ‘gender reveals’.
Only, she doesn’t quite reveal a gender at all, but rather an inclination of a system of identification, categorisation, and assimilation. Charming bulbous shapes resemble the images taken by a microscope, perhaps poking fun at the ultimately reductive method of attaching a gender to an identity.
The French-Swiss artist has an upcoming exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chaux-de-fonds.
7 Gaëlle Choisie, Zantray Vert, & Zantray Bleu, 2023 Curated by Daniela Baldelli, Philippe Régnier
The Art Newspaper partner booth
The Prix Marcel Duchamp’s 2024 winner’s two hanging wall sculptures are more exciting — and peculiar — the closer you get. Embedded in an acrylic resin is an orgy of semi-precious ornaments, including ceramic beads, synthetic hair, love locks, and a secret sachet of unidentified contents. The resin flows through the network of metal grates, stained with pigment and interrupting the grid pattern like islands on a map.
Her work often uses found items inhabiting hive-like structures. She approaches her practice like an anthropologist-cum trinket archaeologist, and invites the viewer to ‘change our perspective on the world and become and [active] observer of our own species’.
8 Omar Ba, Fagots, 2024 Wilde
Having grown up in Senegal, Ba went on to train in Switzerland and now lives and works between Dakar and Geneva, amongst other places. His socially engaged, multi-media paintings embody his hybrid lifestyle and confront political discourses without sermonising. Rather, his delicate but fiery pictorial language seems to speak for itself.
This particular painting demonstrates his characteristic technique of starting on a black background, which later becomes transformed by minute strokes and mark-making. The viewer is challenged to first acclimate their gaze to darkness — both literally and metaphorically. Raw, untreated swaths of black emerge as foreground elements, exemplified here by a bundle of sticks that dwarf the figure, seemingly enthralled in labour.
9 Gabriel Kuri, Untitled (AE OCT 16), 2020 Galleria Franco Noero
Kuri’s fun and whimsical sculptures glorify an overlooked but significant development of the industrial revolution. The bread clip’s function has parallels to the commercial art world and the intrinsic function of an art fair; including amplification of volume, increased automation, and a market-inspired practice of efficiency.
True to form, the tags are only numbered on one side. While this is accurate to their form, it also allows for the sculptures to perform dual roles. One side reflects the assembly-line nature of their production, while the other remains empty and free to exist as a more abstract artwork — its silhouette casting a shadow across the floor like a giant factory at sunrise.
At the fair, Kuri engaged in a book signing to celebrate the launch of his latest book, Forms of Contingency and Patterns of Imminence, as part of the Esther Schipper Bookstore. The book is available by Zolo Press and Archivorum.
10 Valentin Rilliet, Untitled (Stage), 2022 Galerie Peter Kilchmann
Rilliet’s artistic practice reinterprets mythologies, folklore, and historical events through symbolism and intercultural studies. Exploring his Swiss-Chinese heritage, his works are filled with layered and ambiguous narratives that combine ghostly anachronistic personas and motifs specific to the contrasting canons and their unique visual languages.
The large diptych is curiously off-centre, with the smaller half housing two of the three figures. Inspired by Chinese socialist-realistic pamphlets, they are dancing around a large table (or stage). The second, larger, and more vacant half gives breathing room to a small dancing devil. Through the spatial imbalance and convoluted narrative, the artist references the ever-underlying ambiguity and inherent challenges of bridging dissimilar cultures and traditions.
Art Genève 2025, 30th January – 2nd February 2025, Palexpo, Geneva. @artgeneve
Categories
Tags
- Agnès Thurnauer
- Anne-Julie Raccoursier
- Art Geneva
- Art Genéve
- Birgit Jürgenssen
- FMAC Fonds d’Art contemporain de la Ville de Genève
- Gabriel Kuri
- Gaëlle Choisie
- Galerie Hubert Winter
- Galerie Peter Kilchmann
- Galleria Franco Noero
- Man Ray
- Marc-Aurèle Debut
- Matias Faldbakken
- Michel Rein
- Omar Ba
- The Cranford Collection
- Valentin Rilliet
