We Are Here!

In the exhibition We Are Here!, Haus Konstruktiv is celebrating its move to Löwenbräukunst-Areal, after almost 25 years in the ewz Unterwerk Selnau building. The first phase of this move sees the museum opening in the eastern part of Limmatstrasse 268. The relocation not only marks a new chapter in the story of this institution, but also provides a perfect opportunity to let visitors experience an inspiring selection from its in-house collection, in three exhibition rooms.

16.5.–28.9.2025
Curated by Sabine Schaschl and Evelyne Bucher

Media Documents

Museum Haus Konstruktiv’s collection comprises around 1000 works, providing a high-quality overview of the development of concrete, constructivist and conceptual art from the 1920s to the present day. The collection has been growing – largely due to donations from artists, galleries and private collectors. In addition, the club Fonds Konkret and (since 2014) a bequest from Elisabeth Launer have enabled targeted acquisitions of contemporary art, thus aiding the ongoing expansion of the collection and interlinking of artistic positions.

The centrepiece of We Are Here! is the rear exhibition hall, which is dedicated to the Zurich Concretists Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Verena Loewensberg, Camille Graeser and those associated with them. Their artwork, which still resonates far beyond Zurich today, gave rise to the establishment of the museum’s supporting foundation in 1986, which is now called the Foundation for Constructivist, Concrete and Conceptual Art.

The gaze of anyone entering this exhibition space is immediately drawn to two paintings by Camille Graeser (1892, Carouge – 1980, Wald). Like the other Zurich Concretists, Graeser, who had fled back to Switzerland from Germany in 1933, was strongly influenced by Russian constructivism and the Dutch de stijl movement. While his early visual structures are defined by horizontals, verticals and the square, he made his later compositions more dynamic by using rhythmic sequences of colour and form. In his late work, even a square falling out of line brings motion into the image.

On the left-hand wall, there are two pieces by Richard Paul Lohse (1902, Zurich – 1988, Zurich). Much like the Russian constructivists, who wanted to contribute to a better society by means of art, Lohse also saw the artist’s role as that of actively helping to shape social and political reality. The Modular and Serial Orders that he developed from the 1940s onwards, with their non-hierarchical structures, embody a democratic design principle that remained important to him throughout his life. His Modular Orders mostly feature complementary colours arranged either in rows, via rotation or by interlocking, while his Serial Orders consist of chromatic sequences with up to 30 elements.

Next comes a string painting by Leo Leuppi (1893, Zurich – 1972, Zurich), who co-founded the artists’ group Allianz with Lohse in 1937 and, as its long-standing president, played an important mediating role for avant-garde art in Switzerland. The exhibitions organised by Allianz brought together such diverse movements as constructivism, concrete art and surrealism. This openness is also reflected in Leuppi’s own work, in which both constructivist and surrealist elements can be found.

Verena Loewensberg (1912, Zurich – 1986, Zurich), like Max Bill, also belonged to the Allianz group. She was the only woman in the Zurich Concretists’ inner circle. Despite participating in numerous exhibitions, this female artist, and her understanding of concretion and composition, had a different status in the male-dominated concretist scene. She was only widely recognised from the 1970s onwards, when her oeuvre began to be appreciated for its diversity in particular. Thus, in 1981, Loewensberg became the first woman to be honoured with a solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich. Her artworks, always untitled and painted in oil, are based on simple geometric forms and have a poetic effect, due to her subtle use of colours. There is also something light and upbeat about them, which, to no small extent, can be attributed to the artist’s fondness for jazz music.

Max Bill (1908, Winterthur – 1994, Berlin, DE), two of whose diamond-shaped paintings are on display, was probably the most dynamic of the Zurich Concretists. He worked in various professional fields and, also as an author, conveyed his ideals far beyond Switzerland’s borders in numerous texts. In one programmatic 1936 text, drawing inspiration from Theo van Doesburg, he formulated the principles of concrete art, which he would later make more and more precise. Influenced by Wassily Kandinksy, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Josef Albers, all of whom Bill met in 1927/28 as a Bauhaus student in Dessau, he developed an independent artistic language. He saw painting as the core of his wide-ranging oeuvre – as an unrestricted testing ground for aesthetic ideas based on measure and order, bound to a justifiable, rationally structured concept.

Florin Granwehr (1942, St Gallen – 2019, Zurich) always developed his drawn or sculpted works according to clear logic, based on mathematics and geometry. One central constant in his body of work is an engagement with numerical ratios, series of numbers and mathematical formulae, which he used to determine the proportions and angular dimensions of his three-dimensional structures. A closeness to constructivist-concrete art is unmistakable, even though Granwehr himself repeatedly distanced himself from its teachings. Many of his works actually come across like visualised conceptual models, which also suggests a certain affinity with conceptual art.

Four artists presented in the same room deal with the theme of coloured edges and the blurring thereof: In her white relief structures, Shizuko Yoshikawa (1934, Omuta, JP – 2019, Zurich) played with finely nuanced Colour Shadows, which appear as glowing lines of colour at the edges of the reliefs. Hans Jörg Glattfelder (b. 1939, Zurich) and Jakob Bill (b. 1942, Zurich) also work with coloured boundary zones in their paintings. In Bill’s work, an inner square is surrounded by a band of colour that progresses from yellow to light green and from yellow to orange, respectively. Glattfelder, on the other hand, uses a network of double lines in two different colours that run close together, delineating internal square shapes. The chosen colour combination of the double lines creates a flickering effect.
Adding to the presentation on this wall, a late work by Nelly Rudin (1928, Basel – 2013, Uitikon) also features a composition that focuses on the edge of the picture. Rudin’s Design for a Line 2 VBZ Tram (1990), a vehicle that ran on the streets of Zurich from 1990 to 1992, is also on display. This piece is typical of the Zurich Concretists and those around them, many of whom worked not only in the fine arts, but also in the applied arts at the same time, be it as architects, graphic artists or designers. Zurich’s VBZ tram line 2 runs to Tiefenbrunnen: From 1987 to 2000, this was home to the Foundation for Constructivist and Concrete Art, as it was then known, which is indicated by the tram advertising that bears the foundation’s logo from that era.

In the next section of the room, we present works by Gottfried Honegger (1917, Zurich – 2016, Zurich) and Fritz Glarner (1899, Zurich – 1972, Locarno), two artists closely associated with Haus Konstruktiv. Honegger was one of the initiators of our supporting foundation. His Tableau-relief (1986) is on display, combining a strict square grid with a painterly, voluptuous, shimmering black surface. Beside it, there hangs a Relational Painting (1956) by Fritz Glarner, who was close to the Zurich Concretists but more strongly influenced by Piet Mondrian after moving to the USA in 1936. Glarner developed a system for his compositions, consisting of modules with rectangles cut at 15 degrees on one side, in the colours red, blue, yellow, black, white and grey. Glarner interlocked these differently sized trapezoidal shapes to create a rhythmically dynamised and sensitively balanced structure. In his Rockefeller Dining Room, this artist expanded the principle of ‘relational painting’ to produce an impressive walk-through all-over. This room design, created for New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller before he became US Vice President, will be made accessible again in 2026, when our second exhibition wing opens in the western section of Löwenbräukunst-Areal.

The works Red Explosion by Christian Herdeg (b. 1942, Zurich) and Light Brushes 3 & 4 by Marguerite Hersberger (b. 1943, Basel) introduce light as a compositional element. Both Herdeg and Hersberger use light to make spaces tangible to the senses, playing with colour, transparency and architectural references, so as to create an impression of immateriality. It is therefore hardly surprising that ‘art in architecture’ also became an important field of work for these two artists.

The Cristallina series by Rita Ernst (b. 1956, Windisch) is based on architectural floor plans of historical castles in Sicily. Her rhythmic arrangement of vertical and horizontal fields, with strips of black, grey, silver and white, creates multi-layered image spaces, in which fascinating interplay between figure and ground can be experienced.

Pieces by Elodie Pong (b. 1966, Boston, US) and Philippe Decrauzat (b. 1974, Lausanne) hang opposite each other in the passage. They are in black and white, star-shaped and propeller-shaped respectively, and both thematise the seeing eye. Decrauzat, who often uses op-art techniques in his oeuvre, makes our gaze glide along the structure, outwards from the centre: This work’s title, Peripheral Vision, says it all. Pong, on the other hand, uses motion, the core element of kinetic art, to let the observer perceive circles where, at a standstill, black and white square sections are seen.

In the second exhibition room, on the right-hand side, Parcours à angles droits by Vera Molnar (1924, Budapest, HU – 2023, Paris, FR) is shown. From the 1950s onwards, Molnar regularly explored the theme of the line. She looked into the question of when a line becomes a rectangle, or of whether the rectangle already contains the line within itself. These ambiguities can also be experienced here and are supplemented by the theme of the line as a ‘trail’.

Opposite, there are four works by Andreas Christen (1936, Bubendorf – 2006, Zurich). Both as an artist and as a designer, Christen maintained a conceptual approach characterised by the clarity of geometry. In his artworks, he combined this with the ephemeral phenomenon of light. When natural light falls on the purely white visual surfaces that are slanted in relation to one another, manifold movements of light and shadow occur, with various grey and white nuances. Depending on the viewing angle, this leads to an unsteady visual experience and thus encourages us to scrutinise our own perception: How reliable is what we think we see?

On closer inspection, the palm-like sculptures by artist Vanessa Billy (b. 1978, Geneva) turn out to be bundles of fibre-optic and power cables mounted on steel. While the lower part is tightly bound, the upper part explodes in all directions. These cables, which infiltrate the world as an invisible subterranean infrastructure that we rely on daily as a matter of course, appear almost organic and alien when removed from their functional context. Thus, these two works change our perspective. “We have been enjoying ‘composing’, changing oil into plastic, for example,” explains Vanessa Billy, “and now we need to learn to ‘decompose’. Nothing disappears. It might change state, but it remains. We live in a closed circuit.”

In her artwork, Sonia Kacem (b. 1985, Geneva) distinguishes herself with a heightened sensitivity towards materials. In her untitled series from 2024, she addresses the accumulation of materials, the use of lines and draping to define volumes, and ornamentation. Inspired by minimalism, particularly that of American artist Robert Morris, Kacem explores the effects of gravity on material and the tensions that vitalise it.

The piece Free Buren by Sylvie Fleury (b. 1961, Geneva) shows how this artist plays with the earnestness of art concepts that have masculine connotations, by making slight additions or modifications: Vertical stripes have been the hallmark of French artist Daniel Buren for decades. For the 2016 exhibition Thinking Outside the Box at Haus Konstruktiv, Fleury combined her mural The Eternal Wow with her painting Free Buren to create a site-specific wall piece. She stretched Buren’s typical stripes, producing the appearance of a three-dimensional bulge: an ironic reading of his always strictly defined works.

Venezuelan artist Ricardo Alcaide (b. 1967, Caracas, VE) takes a contemporary approach to his country’s constructivist-concrete tradition, which he combines with a biographical and socio-critical aspect in his works. Multiple variations on the theme of sunset can be found in Alcaide’s oeuvre, whereby he varies his colour palette only slightly, mostly adhering to pastel shades. For this artist, numerous notions play a role here: On one hand, the setting sun is a childhood memory that reminds him of growing up in a prosperous Venezuela; on the other hand, it represents a glaring downfall – and therefore also has political connotations. It becomes a symbol of the link between yesterday and today, and ultimately of infinity. The installation Sunset serves as an example of this. The work consists of seven wall-mounted objects that resemble display cases, in yellow, orange, apricot, pink, violet, light blue and petrol blue. The objects, made of polyurethane on MDF, are geometrically divided by lines or protruding elements (and also united by a common horizon line across the seven works). Only upon close inspection does it become clear whether the divisions are painted or actually physically inserted: a trompe-l’œil effect that calls for observation from different angles.

Tobias Putrih (b. 1972, Kranj, SI) has produced an extensive group of sculptures bearing the title Macula, which are also about the capture of light, and the boundaries between visibility and invisibility. Slightly taller than an average person, these cardboard columns with varying diameters enclose a central empty space. They are translucent and generate a moiré effect, thanks to their delicate structure.

Situated opposite Alcaide’s objects, Connect the Dots is a piece by Austrian artist Brigitte Kowanz (1957, Vienna, AT – 2022, Vienna, AT), who worked extensively with the medium of light. The title is a quote from a 2005 speech given by Steve Jobs at Stanford University, which is translated here into Morse code. Jobs spoke about various decisions in his life that only later, when he was looking at them backwards, turned out to be a connectible sequence of milestones in his career. Thus, Kowanz’s installation cannot be deciphered at first glance either. Only when we have read the work ‘to the end’ and decoded all the signs, i.e. connected the dots (and dashes) as it were, do we understand the message. This metaphor can be applied to many aspects of life and is indeed illustrative of how (art) history is written. Our work at Museum Haus Konstruktiv is also about finding new connections between points in the history of constructivist, concrete and conceptual art, as we address its legacy. Again and again, we consider such points from a present-day perspective – but that just means looking backwards at them.

To the left of Kowanz’s installation, there hangs a collage by Elisabeth Wild (1922 Vienna, AT – 2020 Panajachel, GT). This artist spent the last years of her life in the highlands of Guatemala. Amid this region’s lush vegetation, at the desk in her studio, Wild created a collage almost every day. She took the required material from magazines devoted to fashion, art and architecture. The format depended on whatever motif the artist chose as the background image and carrier of the respective collage. With scissors, glue and a magnifying glass, as well as a keen sense of colour, form and composition, Wild created enigmatic visual worlds, which she referred to as ‘fantasías’ but gave no individual titles. Often arranged symmetrically, the delicate paper cutouts are interleaved, creating dense microcosms that shift between reality and illusion, in which seemingly surreal components appear just as often as geometric shapes, architectural elements, sections of logos or other delightful finds. With this intuitive and playful remixing, Wild simultaneously went on a foray through the stylistic devices evident in the history of 20th-century art and culture.

Harald Naegeli (b. 1939, Zurich) has been known as the ‘Sprayer of Zurich’ since the mid-1970s. His graffiti work has been a challenge for the city of church reformer Zwingli, where the slogan ‘to be allowed, it must not disturb’ has been used in an attempt to discipline the city’s residents. Like a phantom in the night, Naegeli brings his minimalist figures into the public space without any concerns about ownership structures. It is less well known that Naegeli, who began his training as a scientific draughtsman at the Zurich School of Applied Arts and whose works allude to Kazimir Malevich among others, has also created numerous collages and drawings. Naegeli describes his graffiti as extroverted art and a response to the history of dadaism, whereas he sees his oeuvre of drawings as his introverted, meditative work. The Primordial Cloud series that he began in 1991, eight sheets of which are in Museum Haus Konstruktiv’s collection, occupies a special position here. In the field of tension between emptiness and form, on a white background symbolising the universe, the fine structures applied with ink are manifestations of energy and, consequently, of life. Incorporating the latter, Naegeli also makes diary-like notes on the backs of his Primordial Clouds. The everyday and the existential thus go hand in hand.

Hanging to the left of Naegeli’s drawings, a work by Christine Streuli (b. 1975, Bern) addresses a characteristic feature of concrete-constructivist art, with its geometrically structured background. The brushstroke plays a central role in Streuli’s oeuvre: Firstly, as a kind of homage, it refers to the tradition of painting itself; secondly, it alludes to iconic works like Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes, thus establishing a link to pop art and to art history as a whole. The brushstroke is also celebrated in Falling Apart (permanent version)_05. Here, it is not presented as a painterly element, but as a reference to the link between classical painting and contemporary art.

The diverse oeuvre of Rodrigo Hernández (b. 1983, Mexico City, MX) encompasses a very wide variety of media and is characterised by a poetic approach to forms, materials and meanings, whereby writing and language play a key role. With particularly striking effect, he makes reference to pre-colonial writing systems, such as that of the Maya, which he does not see as a mere historical relic, but as a living visual language.

The tour of the exhibition concludes with The End by Francisco Sierra (b. 1977, Santiago, CL). From here, in front of Sierra’s sarcastic and cheeky artwork, a glance to the right, looking back at Yellow-Black Volume 11:1 by Camille Graeser, with its falling square, clearly shows that references to the constructivist-concrete know no bounds, nor do they show any signs of ending.

In the foyer, we bridge the gap between this exhibition and our last one in the ewz Unterwerk Selnau building: Concepts of the All-Over. For that show, Esther Stocker (b. 1974, Schlanders, IT) created an immersive artwork, whose strict order was interrupted by Crumpled Sculptures. Here, the artist has adapted two of those sculptures to the new spatial conditions and ‘recycled’ the original material. Thus, as souvenirs, they harbour memories of our former location, while as stand-alone works, they raise questions about of all kinds of systems of order.

The wall-mounted piece Orange Curve by Carissa Rodriguez (b. 1970, New York, US) belongs to a series of monochrome pictures cast from salt, whose forms refer to the visual vocabulary of the USA’s hard-edge artist Ellsworth Kelly.

In the future, Museum Haus Konstruktiv will also be making use of the ‘glass box’ outside our exhibition rooms, in the passage to the west wing of Löwenbräukunst-Areal. During the collection exhibition, we are showing two video works by Dominik Stauch (b. 1962, London, UK), in each of which, sound determines the rhythm of animated visual sequences. In Hard Edge Ride (2011), floating light-yellow colour fields glide in front of a deep-black background and generate a fascinating, constantly changing visual effect. Like the title, the clearly structured geometric composition and cool aesthetics bring to mind hard-edge painting from the 1960s. The interplay of colours and forms is accompanied by subtly vibrant guitar sounds and samples.