The Best Shows to See in Basel and Zurich Right Now

Klara Lidén | Kunsthalle Zurich  | 14 June – 7 September

‘Over out und above’ marks the first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland by the Stockholm-born, Berlin-based artist Klara Lidén. Across two floors of Kunsthalle Zurich, Lidén continues her visually austere investigation of the enmeshing of public and private spaces using urban readymades. Her growing inventory of objects sourced in cities across the world, including lightboxes and rubbish bins, is accompanied by new sprawling installations, such as Gang Gang Gang (2025), which repurpose elements of Zurich’s construction sites – its tunnels and fences – meant to both safeguard and police the pedestrian flow. The show forms a bleak cityscape, inhabited by minimalist entities, governed by the ebb and flow of appropriation and reappropriation. 

Travis Boyer | Peter Kilchmann, Rämistrasse, Zurich | 13 June – 25 July

If the subject matter of Travis Boyer’s new paintings in ‘Personal Effects’ seems ordinary – posed human figures, still lifes of crystal or fungal matter, arrangements of everyday objects, such as candles and belt buckles – their execution is anything but. Using his signature technique of applying protein dyes to sheets of silk velvet, later encased in opalizing custom frames, the artist creates objects that, in their fierce materiality, resist digital reproduction. The works also reveal Boyer’s celebration of art-historical tropes and contemporary queer culture: Feel the Night Is Made of Rocks (2025), for instance, depicts two shimmering, erect crystal structures – a carnally charged double entendre. 

Becky Tucker | Fabian Lang, Zurich | 22 May – 30 July

Enter Glasgow-based artist Becky Tucker’s latest show, ‘The Quarry’, and you immediately feel you’re being watched. Furtive glances follow you from across the room or just beyond your turn. Tucker’s ceramic creatures are uncanny hybrids: pale, humanoid figures, such as Atlas (all works 2025), with faces embedded in their torsos, knees or feet and horns growing where their body hair should be. Posed like mannequins, lips half-open, they are accompanied by phantasmagoric reptiles, such as Cairn, which initially seem more approachable until you notice they have similar features. The artist’s mastery of ceramics and glazes, alongside her penchant for research, allows her to summon beings that share characteristics across cultures and eras. Pieced together from fictional accounts, these creatures seem unsettlingly real, heralding from a land before time. 

Rosalind Nashashibi | Urs Meile, Rämistrasse, Zurich | 13 June – 25 July 

Galerie Urs Meile inaugurates its new space in Zurich’s Ankerstrasse with a major group exhibition featuring Rosalind Nashashibi’s Bachelor Machines 1 (2007), a slow-paced collection of 30-second clips shot on an all-male cargo ship. The work quietly yet attentively documents the vessel’s machinery and crew as they navigate the North Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The same sensibility threads through Nashashibi’s solo exhibition of recent paintings on view at the gallery’s Rämistrasse space. ‘Tender Horse’ presents familiar compositions, including still lifes and nudes, which reference works by canonical male painters such as Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet. Nashashibi borrows from these original paintings while introducing alternate perspectives. In Vase with Flowers, Hand with Stone (2025), for instance, an innocent floral motif is coupled with a sign of imminent violence, hinting at psychological unease. 

Meret Oppenheim | Hauser & Wirth, Basel | 4 June – 19 July

Hauser & Wirth’s young Basel outpost follows a curated programme of historic presentations. The third exhibition to be installed in this 19th-century, former ribbon factory showcases one of Switzerland’s most celebrated artists, Meret Oppenheim. Curated in collaboration with the former director of Kunstmuseum Basel, Josef Helfenstein, the exhibition spans the majority of the artist’s wide-ranging career. Featuring more than 20 works, it juxtaposes rarely shown 1930s ink drawings, such as Seiltänzer (Tightrope Walker, 1932), with abstract oil paintings from the 1950s and ’60s and dadaesque objects from the 1970s. These latter include Eichhörnchen (Squirrel, 1970), a hybrid beer mug with a squirrel’s tail – a playful echo of Oppenheim’s iconic, fur-covered teacup Object (Déjeuner en fourrure) (Fur Breakfast, 1936), which both propelled and narrowly defined her affiliation with surrealism.

Dala Nasser | Kunsthalle Basel | 16 May – 10 August

For ‘Xíloma. MCCCLXXXVI’, Dala Nasser has created an arresting installation across the Kunsthalle’s upper floor that recounts the history of the Byzantine church of St. Christopher, once located near the Kabr Hiram site in Qana, Lebanon. Combining wood with fabrics dyed using site-specific pigments and ambient soundscapes made in collaboration with architect and composer Mhamad Safa, Nasser conjures the church’s original scale and convoluted past. Most notable is the re-creation of the sixth-century floor mosaic – removed for restoration in the 19th century and subsequently transferred to the Louvre Museum in Paris, where it remains to this day. What begins as a sequence of relatable physical vantage points dissolves into multiple perspectives, where claims to monuments, artifacts and histories ultimately prove impossible to reconcile. 

Suzanne Lacy | Museum Tinguely, Basel | 9 April – 7 September

When Suzanne Lacy visited Ecuador in 2014, she was introduced to the women’s rights campaign Cartas de Mujeres (Women’s Letters), which involved 10,000 participants sharing their experiences of gender-based violence in the form of letters. Lacy’s six-channel video installation De tu puño y letra (By Your Own Hand, 2014–15/2019) is a response to what she saw as the unanswered calls within these texts, making it one of the most acclaimed works in her practice. In this piercing, 30-minute performance in five acts, hundreds of men – assembled at a bullfighting arena in Ecuador’s capital city, Quito – proceed to read out the anonymous accounts. The artist’s involvement of male readers highlights not only the gendered dynamics of power but the credibility that comes with it.

Also not to be missed is Gallery House Zurich. Running from 5 to 15 June, this fair and exhibition programme brings together up-and-coming art spaces and galleries from Zurich and beyond in a shared venue near the Löwenbräu Areal.

_{Main image: Meret Oppenheim, Mondlandschaft, 1963, oil on canvas, 90 × 170 cm. Courtesy: © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich; photograph: Jon Etter}