The exhibition “Language of Light” presents Christian Herdeg’s new edition “Neon meets Argon” together with the work “Cobalt/Coralrose” from 2017 and “Figure Three" from 2026, which is being shown for the first time. In the interplay between the three works, it becomes clear that Herdeg does not work with light alone, but understands light, color, and surface as interconnected elements. His neon and argon tubes appear as lines in space, yet they always enter into a relationship with acrylic glass, painted surfaces, architectural situations, and the surrounding walls, where color expands, reflects, and changes.

Since the early 1970s, Christian Herdeg has been one of the most important representatives of light art in Switzerland. He began early on to work with neon and argon tubes as autonomous artistic materials. While many neon works in the context of Pop Art used language, signs, or narrative elements, Herdeg increasingly developed the
tube into an autonomous line. What became decisive was not only the form of the light body itself, but its relationship to architecture, surface, and movement. Again and again, Herdeg examined how light reacts to materials, how it refracts, reflects, or expands.

Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Exhibition on view: June 13 – September 12

“WORDS” brings together works by Rosa Barba, Robert Barry, Tony Cokes, Bethan Huws, Daniela Keiser, Renée Levi, Jonathan Monk, and Nora Turato, focusing on language, writing, and signs as artistic media. Words themselves become the material: as individual terms, sentences, signs, surfaces, rhythms, and print forms. The focus is not on language as an abstract system, but on the word as a visible unit of meaning: an element that can be placed, repeated, shifted, printed, read, and recontextualized.

Since Conceptual Art emerged in the 1960s, the word and language more broadly, has been a central means of expanding art from the visible object into the realm of idea, action, and perception. For printmaking, this development has been particularly formative. Few other media connect the physical presence of material, color, and image carrier so directly with the possibility of reproducing and disseminating ideas. Especially today, in an age of large language models, in which words have become tools and building blocks of artificial intelligence, the question of their origins, structures, and material forms arises anew.

The works in "WORDS" return words to their concrete manifestations: the alphabet, the individual term, the sentence, the fragment, the trace, and the sign. Rosa Barba's new edition is created with a sphere whose surface is entirely covered with letters, numbers, and signs — at once object, archive, and printing tool. Inked and moved by hand across the paper, each movement, each rotation, and each pressure leaves a different trace: not a classical edition of identical sheets, but a series of 20 unique works. Words appear not as readable text, but as a material storage of information, time, and movement.

Exhibition: 13 June – 12 September 2026
Vernissage: Friday, 12 June, 6 – 9 pm