For Zurich Art Weekend 2026, US artist Avery Singer presents new paintings and a site-specific architectural intervention transforming the upstairs Zurich gallery into a space reminiscent of a casino – a charged environment shaped by surveillance. Within the paintings, Singer expands upon the figure of the poker player: a protagonist that parallels the role of the artist, operating under high stakes, reading patterns, anticipating risk and perceiving what others might overlook. Moving away from animation software, Singer employs open-source and AI-based tools to select and incorporate images drawn from post-2001 contemporary warfare – using references that evoke the mediated violence of the era – to serve as building blocks for her paintings. These fragments function like overlays within a larger composition, foregrounding the harsh realities that persist beyond the studio, yet are easily neglected in the everyday. Notably, Singer’s use of AI to develop the prompts and keywords that initiate aspects of the image generation process further implicates themes of automation and control, while exploring the paradoxes of the digital era.

Singer’s work explores the possibilities in the convergence of painting, architecture and technology. Her highly distinctive oeuvre incorporates both autobiographical and fictional narratives, reflecting upon the art world today and the wider sweep of art history that she has inherited as a painter. Singer’s pioneering techniques are deployed to question the ways in which images and their distribution in our contemporary world are increasingly informed by new media and technologies.

Opening during Zurich Art Weekend 2026, ‘Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked’ is the first European exhibition bringing together the work of Henry Taylor, one of today’s most celebrated artists, in dialogue with that of his teacher, California modernist James Jarvaise (1924 – 2015). It is significant that Taylor’s debut at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich takes place in dialogue with Jarvaise—the artist who saw something special in Taylor when he was a student in the 1980s.

Travelling from Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, the exhibition will feature over seven decades of works that explore the artists’ mutual interest in the figure and landscape. On view will be paintings and drawings from Jarvaise’s Hudson River School series, which was included in the famous 1959 exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in which Jay DeFeo, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella also debuted as emerging artists. These historic works will be presented along with modernist collages from the 1950s and figurative paintings from the 1960s that were specifically chosen by Taylor. Encapsulating more than three decades, Taylor’s own work is represented by over 40 paintings to concentrate on portraits of friends, family and strangers, figure studies, neighborhood scenes and landscapes. This installation is grounded by a magnificent group of tree sculptures—each trunk sporting an arboreal afro of artificial hair—that Taylor, who plays as hard with language as he does the brush, refers to as his ‘For-Us’ forest.

Henry Taylor credits James Jarvaise with having been the first to recognize his talents in the early 1980s. At the time, Taylor was supporting himself as a psychiatric technician at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital while pursuing a range of interests, including classes in journalism, cultural anthropology and set design at Oxnard College. There, he repeatedly enrolled in Jarvaise’s painting class, where he was introduced to the works of Max Beckmann, Jean Dubuffet, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly and other modernists who were entirely new to him. The title is taken from advice Jarvaise imparted to his student: the words of a vital teacher who offered Taylor many lessons on how to build a painting with integrity. The exhibition coincides with Taylor’s major solo exhibition at Musée national Picasso-Paris, opening 8 April 2026.