Alina Kopytsia, Sarah Margnetti, Valentin Rilliet

Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zurich is pleased to present a group exhibition with three new positions that each explore themes of personal freedom, feminism, gender identity, mythology, and memory. 

Alina Kopytsia  (b.1983, Poliske, Kyiv Region, Ukraine), lives and works in Zurich. Her various-sized embroideries and ceramics explore ambiguity in gender stereotypes and societal and sexual conventions. This series of works is accompanied by an installation that celebrates artists, intellectuals, and performers that are significant for the queer movement. Kopytsia’s techniques, generally associated with female skills, allow her to generate an intriguing juxtaposition between form and content.

Sarah Margnetti (b.1983, Monthey, VS, Switzerland), lives and works in Brussels. In three newly produced paintings and an on-site mural on the first floor and through the stairway of the gallery, Margnetti blends the human body with architectural elements in cartoonish hybridizations that challenge notions of gender, sexuality, and domesticity. Her figures move seamlessly through surfaces and change their shape, revealing themselves in trompe l'œil as fragmented parts and architectural materials. Oscillating between objectification and re-appropriation, she depicts her motifs with a timeless understanding of materiality, femininity, and beauty. Margnetti is the recipient of the Manor Art Prize in 2022 and had a solo show at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in the same year.

Valentin Rilliet (b.1996, Geneva, Switzerland), lives and works in Zurich. Rilliet explores the complex exchanges between his Eastern heritage and the Western artistic canon he was brought up with. Repurposing China’s folklore and socialist propaganda is the core of his painting practice and his ever-evolving considerations of culture and identity. Rilliet, who himself is of mixed Chinese-Swiss background, has produced five new works for the exhibition in the tradition of historical paintings tied to his autobiography. Rilliet’s works are composed of rearranged anachronistic elements from vintage socialist pamphlets, still images from propaganda movies, and subjects that he combines with magical realism.