Featured Events in Gstaad in July, 2025 (July Updated)

Gagosian is pleased to present THE MOUNTAIN, an exhibition of new works by Sterling Ruby. In dialogue with the Romantic tradition of the sublime, Ruby explores themes of germination, birth, growth, and decay, drawing upon the physical and metaphysical cycles of life. Intimately rooted in the artist’s time in California’s Eastern Sierras, these sculptures and paintings are deeply attuned to environmental transformation. On view from July 11 through September 7, the presentation will extend beyond the gallery’s walls, with works installed at locations throughout the historic alpine town of Gstaad.

Almine Rech Gstaad is pleased to present 'Loitering', Brian Calvin's ninth solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from July 12 to August 30, 2025. In the long list of writings about painting, there are few phrases as clever and catchy as the one coined by Maurice Denis in 1890. Nowadays, as we stand at the other end of the long and turbulent history of artistic modernity, it deserves to be slightly reformulated in order to align with our customs. But once this has been done, it turns out that it remains strikingly relevant to Brian Calvin's painting. Before being representations of young socialite women, influencers attempting product placement, or generational emblems of an overconnected present, his paintings are first and foremost flat surfaces covered with colours assembled in a certain order. In these gatherings of well-groomed faces, cropped to varying degrees depending on the painting, we seem to recognise an analogy of digital communities. We seem to recognise a pop image from everyday life in a soda can, a T-shirt, or a pair of oversized glasses. But these are red herrings. Brian Calvin likes to emphasise the constructed dimension of images, breaking with the internal logic of painting. And that is the primary purpose of the soda cans, glasses, T-shirts, lipsticks (whose shade and brand we could probably identify), and all the images incorporated into the composition in the form of visual micro-events. Rather than relating the painting to the outside world (Western, industrialised, connected), they open a breach in representation. 'When you work with images, that's people's starting point. It's really hard to look at faces nowadays, especially when they're cropped, and not think about image overload or social media. This interpretation is often applied to my work, and I don't think it's wrong. But it's simply not my starting point; in fact, it's the part of my work that puzzles me the most ,' explains the painter, who is more likely to cite the "icy quality" of Piero della Francesca's paintings as a source of inspiration than the great American pop tradition.