Zilla Leutenegger

Zilla Leutenegger, «Sit & Wait», 2020. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Paris, © Zilla Leutenegger

Zilla Leutenegger
SPACES BETWEEN

23 September 2026 – 7 March 2027

In the exhibition Spaces Between Zilla Leutenegger presents ten of her multimedia installations and a number of monotypes, offering glances of mysteriously inhabited architecture and faint outlines of a life. It is as if someone had moved into the building, leaving occasional traces and shadows of their existence. As well as telling short, poetic stories, these moments invite visitors to rediscover the museum – and to see it with different eyes.

Zilla Leutenegger (born 1968 in Zurich) is among the defining figures in Swiss contemporary art. In a beguiling symbiosis of analogue and digital media, her work centres on her unmistakable multimedia installations and the “video drawings” in which she layers mural drawings and video projections. In this way, a static space is suddenly brought to life by the projected shadow of a moving figure.

Zilla Leutenegger, Think twice, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Paris, photo: Sebastian Schaub

These ingenious spatial situations set the stage for the profound storytelling that plays a key role in work. She often appears as her alter ego Zilla, a figure who – either filmed, drawn or digitally constructed – quietly performs everyday actions: reading, waiting, or looking out of the window. Through these intimate moments, the artist weaves a subtle narrative to which viewers respond with memories of their own.

Leutenegger’s narratives are rarely linear. Instead, she captures atmospheric states and fleeting emotions. The spaces built out of light, projections and sketches appear as walk-in dream sequences where the borders between fiction and reality, and between two- and three-dimensionality, become completely blurred.

Her oeuvre is an ongoing narrative on the poetry of everyday life. By inviting viewers into her immersive worlds, she makes them into silent partners in her haunting stories.

Zilla Leutenegger, Plein Soleil, 2026, simulation video installation, Courtesy the artist and Gallery Judin, Berlin

In this exhibition, her poetic works enter into an exciting dialogue with the Museum Tinguely collection. In this exchange, Leutenegger’s quite, large-scale projections meet with Tinguely’s mechanical dynamism, creating a story about movement, light and space that offers a fascinating new take on the poetry of the everyday.

Curator: Andres Pardey

Zilla Leutenegger, schlafender Hund, 2013, simulation video installation. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Peter Kilchmann, Zurich/Paris