The museum: Alongside tempting temporary exhibitions, visit for Zürich’s largest collection of modern art – taking in Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet and Marc Chagall – the work of contemporary Swiss artists, and the museum’s spectacular extension by David Chipperfield Architects, which opened in 2021. The exhibition: LA-based AI artist Refik Anadol is known for transforming vast datasets into visually stunning and emotionally resonant artworks. Currently on display at the Kunsthaus Zürich’s David Chipperfield extension, his spectacular, immersive work Glacier Dreams (2023) uses AI to address the critical subject of climate change. Highlighting the fragility, beauty and vulnerability of Earth’s glaciers, Anadol sourced more than ten million images, including of Iceland, Greenland, and Antarctica, to create the hypnotic ‘data painting’, where constantly moving pixels replace paint dabs. The artist’s dynamic, emotive approach questions the permanence of art and underscores the impermanence of the natural world.
With Museum Für Gestaltung Zürich, you get one design museum, four locations; on now at the Ausstellungsstrasse site, style icon Susanne Bartsch’s retrospective is structured like a night out
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Kunsthaus Zürich
Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
Museum Rietberg, Zürich
Fotomuseum Winterthur
MUSEUMS FEATURED IN THis CLiP
World-class art, design and photography await at 11 Swiss museums. Take a video tour with Wallpaper* and Switzerland Tourism to peek inside architecturally intriguing sites in Zürich, Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano and Winterthur, then plan your trip with our guide to the best exhibitions to see this autumn and winter.
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What to see at Switzerland’s art museums this autumn and winter
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Kunsthaus Zürich
Refik Anadol, Glacier Dreams
until mid-2026
-Bill Prince, Editor-in-Chief, Wallpaper*
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(Image credit: Switzerland Tourism. © Vermerk)
The museum: Museum Rietberg casts its eyes firmly beyond Europe. Amid its tantalising collections from Asia, Africa, America and Oceania, you may find Chinese porcelain, Indian miniature paintings, Himalayan Buddhist art – and in a new exhibition, exquisite examples of Japanese woodblock printing. The exhibition: Surimono is a historic style of Japanese woodblock printing that combines poetry and playful design to yield unique works of art. During the 18th and 19th centuries, surimono prints were produced in small, gift editions, on high-quality paper, often to mark special occasions – rather like high-end greetings cards. Museum Rietberg’s ‘Japan de luxe’ presents the richness of the artform’s visual language and the wide variety of styles and printing techniques, encouraging a deeper understanding of Japanese society, customs and material culture.
IN AND AROUND ZÜRICH
Fondation Beyeler, Basel
Kunstmuseum Basel
Museum Tinguely, Basel
Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern
MUSEUMS FEATURED IN THiS CLIP
IN BASEL & BERN
Fondation Beyeler becomes the first museum in Switzerland to devote a retrospective to Yayoi Kusama; included are earlier works never seen in Europe before
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(Image credit: Switzerland Tourism. © Vermerk)
The museum: A chance to delve into art history from the 13th century to the present day, Kunstmuseum Basel’s three locations enable it to display more than 1,000 works from its 300,000-strong collection at any one time, with highlights courtesy of Hans Holbein, Rembrandt, Pablo Picasso, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and more.
The exhibition: At the Neubau, the museum’s 2016 extension by Christ & Gantenbein, expect some spooktacular goings-on as a new exhibition explores ghosts in art. Looking back to the 19th century – an age of rationality, science and technology but also one of strong belief in the supernatural – the show explores the evolution of a rich visual culture associated with ghosts and apparitions. ‘Ghosts. Visualising the supernatural’ presents 160 works and objects created in the past 250 years, with featured artists including William Blake, Thomas Demand, Urs Fischer, Katharina Fritsch, Maria Hofman, Paul Klee, and René Magritte. All the more reason to make the Nebau one of your autumn/winter haunts.
The museum: While dedicated to the work of innovative 20th-century Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), known for his moving mechanical sculptures, Museum Tinguely – located in a suitably striking Mario Botta designed building in Basel – also throws light on the artist’s contemporaries, as well as trends, giving further context to his work.
The exhibition: ‘Nature Never Loses’ surveys six decades of the prescient, genre-defying practice of Santa Monica-based artist Carl Cheng, whose ever-evolving body of work engages with environmental change, the relevance of art institutions to their publics, and the role of technology in society. His inventive lexicon includes photographic sculptures, 'art tools' employed in the production of ephemeral artworks, 'nature machines' that anticipate an artificial world shaped by humans, and extra-institutional interventions intended to reach broad audiences.
The museum: Switzerland’s largest contemporary art museum – set in a former factory building and with a collection of more than 3,000 works – is undergoing a three-year renovation and expansion, but you can still enjoy its off-site programme in the meantime, and plan a return visit for MAMCO’s reopening in 2027.
The exhibition: On show until the end of 2025 at Geneva’s Palais de l’Athénée is an exhibition of Sarah Benslimane’s internet-influenced paintings and sculptures that reflect the flood of information, images, styles and stories instantly available online. Winner of the prestigious Prix Culturel Manor Genève 2025, the French-Algerian-Swiss artist’s work combines hard-edged minimalism with what Benslimane describes as ‘a blast through preconceived notions of vulgarity, sweetness, the feminine and the now, creating a physical space where naiveté, rudeness, the joking and the serious, coexist in harmony’.
In Geneva, Lausanne and Lugano
At Platforme 10, a 25,000 sq m art project, explore post-Second World War creativity, geometric abstraction, neo-Fauvism, new media’s video and installation pieces, alongside drawings, paintings and ‘art autre’ of the second Paris School
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-Bill Prince, Editor-in-Chief, Wallpaper*
The museum: A 25,000 sq m art project sited on a former Lausanne locomotive repair shed, Plateforme 10 brings together the significant resources of three institutions: the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-arts de Lausanne, the Musée de Design et d'Arts Appliqués Contemporains (Mudac) and Photo Elysée, as well as the collections of the Fondation Toms Pauli and the Fondation Felix Vallotton.
The exhibition: Plateforme 10’s impressive, permanent exhibition, laid out chronologically over two floors, displays treasures from Vaud’s art collections with some 300 works dating from the 18th century to the present day. Explore post-Second World War creativity, geometric abstraction, neo-Fauvism, new media’s video and installation pieces, alongside drawings, paintings and ‘art autre’ of the second Paris School.
Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
Susanne Bartsch – Transformation!
until 7 December 2025
The museum: One design museum, four collections (Poster, Design, Graphics and Applied Art), three locations: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich’s portfolio of galleries includes Pavillon Le Corbusier (the architect’s last building, a steel and glass jewel on Lake Zürich) and Toni-Areal (in vibrant Zürich-West), as well as its main Ausstellungsstrasse headquarters (in a listed modernist building). The exhibition: It’s at the Ausstellungsstrasse location that you can currently see a floor-filling retrospective of Susanne Bartsch, a Swiss-born style icon and curator of legendary New York night-club happenings. Her medium? Alternative fashion, hair and make-up, underground night club culture, exhibitionism and performance – hedonism deployed as a creative strategy to break boundaries, challenge norms, foster liberty and inclusivity. Structured like a night out, the show follows an arc of transformation, from mundane daytime life to the euphoria of the late-night dancefloor.
(Image credit: Switzerland Tourism. © Vermerk)
Museum Rietberg, Zürich
Japan de luxe – The Art of the Surimono prints
until 12 July 2026
Fotomuseum Winterthur
Poulomi Basu, Phantasmagoria
25 October 2025 – 15 February 2026
The museum: Fotomuseum Winterthur, dedicated to contemporary photography, reopened earlier in 2025 after an extensive renovation – all the better to showcase its programme of established and emerging names, across solo and group exhibitions.
The exhibition: A highlight of the winter programme is ‘Phantasmagoria’, an exhibition by Indian artist Poulomi Basu. Interweaving documentary photographs and staged scenes enacted in front of fantastical backdrops, Basu creates multimedia, often large-scale installations. The exhibition’s title references the 18th-century shows that captivated audiences with spooky projections and optical illusions. In addition to photography, the artist also works with virtual reality, film and performance, often championing the rights of the marginalised.
The museum: Set within a green campus in Riehen, near Basel, the Renzo Piano-designed Fondation Beyeler is a light-filled home to a permanent collection of modern and contemporary masterpieces – from Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne to Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollack – as well as temporary exhibitions.
The exhibition: This season, it becomes the first museum in Switzerland to devote a retrospective to Japan’s Yayoi Kusama. The show offers a complete overview of her seven-decade exploration of repetitive patterns and structures. Alongside her signature polka dot works and Infinity Mirror Rooms, you’ll find earlier pieces never seen in Europe before and highlighting the breadth of her practice, which embraces painting, sculpture, installations, drawing, collage, performances, fashion and literature.
Fondation Beyeler, Basel
Yayoi Kusama 12 October 2025 – 25 January 2026
Kunstmuseum Basel
Ghosts. Visualizing the supernatural
until 8 March 2026
Museum Tinguely, Basel
Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses
3 December 2025 – 10 May 2026
Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern
Anni Albers. Constructing Textiles 7 November 2025 – 22 February 2026
The museum: A wonder of swooping glass and steel curves designed by Renzo Piano, Zentrum Paul Klee holds one of the most significant collections of the artist’s drawings, watercolours and paintings, and is also a platform for music, dance and literature events – as well as explorations of major creative talents.
The exhibition: A significant figure in 20th-century design, craft and art, Anni Albers’ creative and experimental career began at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, where the young Berliner took lessons with Paul Klee, among others. This new exhibition focuses on Albers’ career as a weaver and textile designer – of so-called ‘utility objects’ that also double as textural and storied, standalone artworks. It’s weaving as a progressive form of modern architectural thought. The show explores the connection between textiles and architecture, between weaving and building, and Albers’ deep understanding of material, cementing her reputation as theorist, graphic designer, innovator and unique artist – a perfect fit for the interdisciplinary cultural centre laying above the old town of Bern.
MAMCO, Geneva
Plateforme 10, Lausanne
MASI Lugano
MUSEUMS FEATURED IN THIS CLIP
MAMCO, Geneva
MAMCO x Société des Arts Sarah Benslimane at Palais de l’Athénée, Geneva
until 20 December 2025
(Image credit: Switzerland Tourism. © Vermerk)
Plateforme 10, Lausanne
Permanent collection
Museo d’Arte Della Svizzera Italiana (MASI Lugano)
Richard Paul Lohse – Retrospective
until 11 January 2026
The museum: Founded in 2015 and now one of the most visited museums in Switzerland, MASI Lugano, part of the LAC cultural centre, is focused first and foremost on artists from the local Ticino region – an Italian-speaking canton – and those that have links to the area.
The exhibition: Concrete artist and graphic designer Richard Paul Lohse was a radical thinker and modernist who used colour, technical drawing and draughtsmanship to create dazzling op-art. MASI Lugano’s ambitious retrospective reiterates the seminal importance of Lohse and his work on an international level. Presenting more than 50 paintings spanning the four fundamental decades of his career, from the 1940s until his death, the exhibition highlights the historical events and social utopias of the period which, along with Lohse’s faith in the expressive power of colour, shaped his rigorous modus operandi.
Zürich
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BASEL & BERN
Geneva, Lausanne & Lugano
The cultural, creative and gastronomical attractions of a metropolis and a backdrop of natural splendour make Zürich unmissable. Make time for its must-see museums.
Switzerland’s unofficial art capital and refreshingly laid-back administrative capital, respectively, Basel and Bern are key stops on any cultural tour, with world-class museums.
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Three cities, three picture-perfect lakeside settings, in the country’s far west and far south – visit the full trio for a peerless taste of Switzerland’s art scene.
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Vaud’s art collections with some 300 works dating from the 18th century to the present day. Explore post-Second World War creativity, geometric abstraction, neo-Fauvism, new media’s video and installation pieces, alongside drawings, paintings and ‘art autre’ of the second Paris School.
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