Curator Bice Curiger champions contemporary art

Bice Curiger is one of the most prolific curators in the Swiss art scene. Her copious creativity is testament to the success of contemporary art in Switzerland and internationally. In 1998 a series of rockets and satellites covered in fluffy white cloth landed in the Kunsthaus museum in Zurich. First Spaceship on Venus, an installation by the Geneva artist Sylvie Fleury, alighted in one of the institution’s most prestigious collection galleries. The contemporary artist was displayed alongside the paintings of Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825), a Zurich native also known as Henry Fuseli, who made his fame in Rome and London. The ambitious show, organised in the Kunsthaus by the curator Bice Curiger, offered more than just an overview of Swiss artistic prowess in the 1990s. Fleury’s rockets and satellites, along with the works of almost one hundred other artists, proved that contemporary art had definitively conquered the hallowed halls of museums. Moreover, the very title of the...