Urban Zellweger: his first interview was on a lovely sunny day

Successfully exhibited in Zürich at Karma International during the city’s last art weekend, Urban Zellweger’s paintings also managed to captivate observers at the FIAC, where two pieces were presented by Karma in the emerging art section. The then 24-year-old Swiss artist – born in Zürich, where he also studied and currently has his studio – seems to gravitate towards paintings which express an evident narrative attitude while sometimes revealing vibrant tensions between human and organic elements. Apparently, the best approach to his system of shapes, colours and foggy atmospheres is by using symbolic and metaphorical interpretations of dreams to get oriented. Before his solo exhibition at Karma International, Urban Zwelleger pieces have only been shown at Plymouth Rock and UP STATE (Zürich); at Astrup Museum in Oslo (in a group show curated by Hacienda); and recently at the FIAC, as mentioned before. He is currently working on two book-projects and a show at Shoot the Lobster in New York that will open in January. We met Urban a few weeks ago on a lovely sunny day in Zürich.

Is this your first interview?

Urban Zellweger: Yes, it is.

Your solo show at Karma International in Zürich was your gallery debut, how did you feel?

Urban Zellweger: Well, it was nice to work for an exhibition and it made me feel good, but that also depends on the people you are working with, which in my case were the people from Karma International. I liked collaborating with them and it was easy because we knew each other already. It’s also nice that you get some input from the people visiting the exhibition.

You studied and worked in Zürich in the past years. Would you recommend it as a place to learn and practice art?

Urban Zellweger: The school in Zürich is not interested in painting at all. But that just annoys me, when I feel like learning something that I wouldn’t find the motivation to do by myself at home or in the studio. I have some really interesting classes in school, but they’re about everything other than painting. At some point I started to like it. It made me more organized and prompt me to look for exchange outside the institution.

What influences you as a painter?

Urban Zellweger: I recently visited the Whitney Museum in New York and I saw a work by Jared French. The painting is called “State Park (1946)”. It’s such a weird scene with a family under a pink sunshade and a lifeguard with a police stick in his hand, who looks like a huge sculpture, and a pale guy with a tattoo that is ready for a boxing fight with the under-body of the lifeguard, even if he’s standing way behind him. The whole perspective is amazing. He managed to create such a bizarre tension between all the people in the painting. It’s moments like this, when you find a new artist that you like, that influence me. It’s funny. I’ve never heard of Jared French or saw something of him before, which really surprised me.

How would you describe the bodies of work showed at Karma?

Urban Zellweger: When I started working for the show, I tried to bear in mind “how things work”. I thought it would just be learning some new skills and collecting some ideas, but I had no idea what to do. Then I thought: let’s just paint little puppet-looking humans, and that produced something. It should be the factory for ideas or something like that. It came out really weird. There is a guy cutting his nails onto a conveyor belt, one puking out round shapes and another one tearing out butterfly wings. The last painting I did was “Inside a hospital”. I had all the works I wanted to show, but then I somehow missed a human face – somebody that you could talk to or who has the responsibility for this whole thing. I don’t know, I guess a lot of people see something else in doctors other than just somebody with a white coat who has a job and knows how you feel or how your body looks like from the inside.

Would it be wrong to read your painting from a storytelling perspective?

Urban Zellweger: The works I’ve done so far are all figurative paintings or drawings. Effectively I often try to build up a narrative. What I like in painting, is that a story or an image that you are making while painting on a canvas keeps on changing until, at one point, it’s just finished and then you move on the next one. It always makes me laugh when I realize that I tried to build up something which then I just left somewhere along the way to the end. So sometimes I try not to think about the story till the end. You can give a structure and put some actors, but then, I guess, it’s nice if you also leave some space for the viewer.

How would your ideal exhibition space look like?

Urban Zellweger: Once some friends from Geneva organized a group show in an apartment of a house that was about to get torn down. There was this beautiful staircase going up to the apartment, so all the pieces that needed a wall went into the staircase and sculptures and installations were in the apartment. That, to me, was perfect.

September 21, 2023