Artists
Doug Aitken
Doug Aitken (American, b. 1968)lives and works in Los Angeles and is known as a multimedia artist. After finishing his studies at the Art Center College of Design he built his reputation on architectural interventions and installations that intervene in public space. Defying definitions of genre, he works in an array of media, including photography, video, sound and sculpture. Aitken aims to reimagine the nature of what art can be and how we experience works of art.
Elmgreen & Dragset
Michael Elmgreen (Danish, b. 1961) and Ingar Dragset (Norwegian, b. 1969) both live in Berlin and since 1995 have worked as an artist duo under the name Elmgreen & Dragset. With their work they examine objects in their historical, political, cultural and sociological context, question the status quo and re-contextualise. By so doing, Elmgreen & Dragset walk a line between art and architecture, installation and performance. Their international breakthrough came with the permanent Installation Prada Marfa in 2005, when they installed a sham Prada store in the middle of nowhere in the Texas desert. The installation The Collectors was their contribution for the adjacent Danish and Nordic Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Since 1997 they have exhibited regularly in key international museums.
Keith Haring
Keith Haring (American, 1958-1990), known for his illustrative depictions of figures and symbols, was an artist and social activist. Initially planning to become a commercial artist, he soon changed his mind and chose to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The school was a hub for the Downtown New York art scene. His Pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. Haring’s popularity grew out of his spontaneous drawings in the subways – chalk outlines of figures, dogs and other stylised images on empty black advertising spaces. In his pieces he combined graffiti, hip-hop and urban aesthetics that were both playful and engaged with social issues.
François Halard
François Halard (French, b. 1961) is a photographer and artist known for his interior and architectural photographs. Trained at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, he was noticed by major names in the decoration and fashion press while still a student. First, he began working for Decoration International, and then with Conde Nast art director Alex Liberman. In 1984, François moved to New York City where he began regular commissions for several Conde Nast publications, including American Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, and House & Garden. After 10 years, he decided to work as an independent photographer and create works that are timeless. He lives and works in Arles.
Tim Walker
Tim Walker (British, b. 1970) creates otherworldly photographs. His fiction and fantasy compositions often involve combinations of interior and exterior and changes of scale. Tim Walker became interested in photography at the Condé Nast library in London where he worked on the Cecil Beaton archive. After graduating in Photography from the Exeter College of Art in Oxford, he worked as an assistant to Richard Avedon in New York. Soon after, Walker began shooting fashion stories for Vogue and W Magazine. Walker’s photographs are nostalgic for an era of innocence and exuberance, youthful imagination and unique aesthetics. The artist lives and works in London.
Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957) is known for his provocative works that blend art with social commentary and political activism. His work spans various media, including sculpture, installation, photography, and film challenging the status quo and advocates for social justice. Ai Weiwei studied animation at the Beijing Film Academy before moving to the United States in 1981. After returning to China in the early 1990s, Ai Weiwei became a prominent figure in the Chinese art scene. The concept artist is a vocal critic of the Chinese government, focusing on human rights and freedom of expression. His activism has led to multiple clashes with authorities, including his high-profile arrest in 2011. Despite these challenges, his works are exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide, and he remains a pitoval figure.
Harley Weir
Harley Weir (British, b. 1991) studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College and is known for creating intimate images and films. Before embarking on a career as a fashion photographer, she moved back and forth with ease between personal and commercial work. Weir’s images are often carefully composed with a highly attuned sense of colour and mise-en-scène. One encounters a candid naturalism that refers to historical models and contemporary portraits. Having shot numerous campaigns for luxury brands, compelling editorials and a series of personal projects, she has become a leading force in the photography and film industries.
William Eggleston & Paul McCarthy
In keeping with the philosophy of the Nicola Erni Collection, photography and contemporary art are presented side by side in this space in a natural and non-hierarchical manner.
The portfolio The Last Dyes by William Eggleston (*1939) comprises 49 photographs taken by the artist in Memphis during the 1970s. Printed using the technically demanding dye-transfer process—most commonly used for advertising posters—the works are distinguished by exceptional color saturation and an almost painterly materiality. Everyday motifs—gas stations, motel rooms, refrigerators—acquire an unexpected aesthetic presence and dignity through this specific printing technique. As the title suggests, these photographs are the final prints ever produced from Eggleston’s originals using this analog process. With Kodak—the world’s sole manufacturer—discontinuing the production of dye-transfer materials, the technique has become definitively obsolete. The Last Dyes thus refers not only to a completed chapter in Eggleston’s oeuvre but also to the finitude of a specific photographic process.
In contrast, Tomato Head (1994) by Paul McCarthy (*1945) is a life-sized comic figure that formally references the first toy advertised on American television, “Mr. Potato Head.” Like its historical predecessor, the figure features openings in place of eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, into which interchangeable elements can be inserted. McCarthy expands this principle by introducing explicit sexual attributes, thereby shifting the seemingly harmless toy into a provocative context. In his characteristically exaggerated and confrontational visual language, he addresses questions of gender identity, social norms, and cultural myths. At the same time, he articulates a critical examination of the ideal of the “American Dream,” interrogating its promise of freedom in light of structural inequalities and dysfunctions.
An unexpected dialogue emerges between the two positions. Both reflect American everyday and popular culture, albeit in different ways. While Eggleston lends reality a quiet intensity through formal precision and technical mastery, McCarthy operates through exaggeration, irony, and deliberate transgression. In their juxtaposition, parallels and contrasts alike become visible—lightness and severity, banality and provocation, documentation and deconstruction. The presentation underscores that photography and contemporary art enter into dialogue here and encounter one another on equal terms.
Dirty Martini: Photographs of the 1960s and 1970s
With over 200 photographs, Dirty Martini presents an extensive selection of works from the 1960s and 1970s drawn from the Nicola Erni Collection. Across five thematic chapters, the lifestyle of prominent protagonists of the era is documented in a multifaceted way through portraits and paparazzi photographs. The works on display are united not only by the period in which they were created but also by a distinctive visual language: black-and-white photography, predominantly in the form of gelatin silver prints. This technique lends the images particular depth, strong contrast, and a timeless quality.
Under the titles Framing Charisma, Art All Around, In Fashion, Hollywood Moments, and In High Spirits, visitors are invited to immerse themselves in distinct thematic worlds. Together, they create a multifaceted portrait of the spirit of the Swinging Sixties and the glamorous Seventies, captured by more than 30 photographers, including Richard Avedon (1923–2004), Ron Galella (1931–2022), and Jeanloup Sieff (1933–2000).
New York’s Roaring 80s
Basquiat, Schnabel, Warhol
This exhibition space brings together a range of monumental works by three artists who were active in New York in the 1980s and were in close dialogue with one another: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Julian Schnabel.
While Warhol and Basquiat blurred the boundaries between Pop Art and Neo-Expressionism in their collaborative works, Schnabel embodied a return to monumental, tactile painting. Despite their differing styles, the works are united by a radical approach to the blending of techniques and visual languages. Whether in Basquiat’s or Schnabel’s collage-like interweaving of text and image, or in Warhol’s iconic silkscreen prints on large-format supports, this marks the expression of a new self-confidence among a generation of artists unwilling to be confined by limited spaces.
The words in Julian Schnabel’s (*1951) work often carry deeply personal meanings, referencing specific memories, places, or people from his own life. These linguistic fragments function—particularly in his abstract works—as anchors for the viewer. Instinctively, we cling to these letters, attempting to reconstruct a story or uncover a hidden meaning. In his monumental painting Ozymandias, the text itself moves to the foreground. The title refers to the sonnets published in 1818 by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Horace Smith, both written after a monumental fragment of a statue of the pharaoh Ramesses II had arrived at the British Museum. Like the poems, Schnabel’s work reflects on the inevitable decay of power and the transience of human glory.
For His Last Time in St. Moritz, he incorporated ceramic shards from plates, cups, and vases onto a wooden surface coated with putty, creating an uneven composition of fragments. These “plate paintings” are among the most significant bodies of work in his oeuvre. During the winter of 1987–88, Jean-Michel Basquiat once again worked in St. Moritz, having been invited by Bruno Bischofberger to use his studio. The following winter, Schnabel completed His Last Time in St. Moritz as a tribute to his friend Basquiat. The work incorporates objects Basquiat had left behind, as well as the image of a chandelier that—when inverted—resembled a fool’s cap. In the painting, this form becomes a symbol of Basquiat himself: a brilliant young artist whose life ended tragically early.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s (1960–1988) art is unpredictable, transforming elements of his everyday surroundings into a free flow of ideas and associations. The early work Untitled (Willy Arron) from 1981 reflects these influences. It was created on an apartment wall and, like many of his wall works, employs materials such as spray paint and crayon. In this piece, recurring symbols appear, including airplanes, a blue car, and a crown—motifs that became central components of his artistic language. The phrase “Pay For Soup, Build A Fort, Set That On Fire!” retrospectively reads like an enigmatic formula in which a credo of Basquiat’s life can be discerned.
Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) monumental work Human Hearts presents 156 human hearts arranged in a serial grid. Rather than using the heart as a romantic symbol, he depicts it as a biological organ, thereby emphasizing the mechanical nature and inherent fragility of the body. The composition balances the precision of black negative silkscreen with the expressive warmth of hand-painted, vibrant colors.
The collaborative works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s brought together two strikingly different yet complementary artistic worlds. Warhol, already an icon of Pop Art, was known for his polished, commercially inflected visual language, while Basquiat’s raw, expressive aesthetic emerged from New York’s downtown art scene. Between 1984 and 1985, the two created over one hundred works, layering Warhol’s clean logos and silkscreened motifs with Basquiat’s words and symbolic figures. Their collaboration was both creative and controversial—a bold dialogue between generations and divergent artistic approaches.
Thinking Big
Portraits seek to capture the identity, inner life, or unmistakable presence of an individual. At the same time, they are invariably shaped by artistic decisions—by choices of form, perspective, and emphasis—that grant each work its distinctive character.
Thinking Big does not present the conventional notion of portraiture; rather, it juxtaposes large-scale portraits from contemporary art and photography, whose appeal lies in reinterpreting what a portrait can be.
A classical portrait is an artistic representation of a person in which the face, expression, and personality take center stage. It often adheres to traditional conventions of composition, lighting, and pose, as developed particularly in painting and early photography.
Mickalene Thomas (*1971)’s Afro Goddess Looking Forward is a powerful painting in which the depicted figure meets the viewer’s gaze directly, signaling a clear awareness of her own image. The work rewrites art history by presenting a Black woman within a bold, aesthetically layered interior inspired by the style of the 1970s. The surface is further enriched with decorative rhinestones, adding texture and material presence.
A similarly direct gaze appears in Richard Avedons (1923-2004)’s portrait of Brigitte Bardot from 1959. The large-format gelatin silver print emphasizes her strongly contrasted facial features, framed by voluminous, double-exposed hair. This effect creates a sense of movement while simultaneously drawing attention to the work of the renowned hairdresser Alexandre de Paris, who is referenced in the title.
Daido Moriyama (*1938) likewise works in black and white, portraying himself in a four-part silkscreen. Though influenced by Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portraits, Moriyama presents himself in different poses, arranged like a fragment of a contact sheet. The work is characterized by high contrast and a grainy texture that underscores the raw immediacy of his photographic style.
For decades, Cindy Sherman (*1954) has explored identity through staged self-portraits. In one such work, she appears in the role of an aristocratic woman. The figure is rendered with clear, even lighting, while the snowy mountain backdrop diverges stylistically, creating a subtle sense of artificiality.
Jean-Michel Basquiats (1960-1988)’s 1986 painting on wooden slats depicts a totemic figure with a pronounced emphasis on the lungs. The work reflects his engagement with African spiritual symbolism as well as his longstanding interest in anatomy—an interest sparked in childhood by the book Gray’s Anatomy, a gift from his mother.
Finally, as its title suggests, Rashid Johnsons (*1977)’s large-scale painting may be interpreted as a portrait of a “soul.” Abstract forms and lines unfold against a dark brown ground, evoking multiple layers of interpretation. In this way, the viewer’s perception becomes as significant as the artist’s intention and style—or the presence of the depicted subject.
