Dozie Kanu blocks the entrance to Francesca Pia’s gallery with a low, square platform studded with cents. I take the H marked out in shinier coins to connote “Helipad” and edge past it into a series of bright rooms arrayed with sculptures composed largely from found metal objects. Among them is hang something metric (all works 2022), which makes a crucifix-like coat rack from a 150 cm rule atop a coiling metal pump component. Though from Texas, Kanu now makes his ambiguous objects in a studio in rural Portugal. The influence can be seen in the selection of decorative Portuguese keyhole plates painted onto the wooden tabletop of aro pillars chukwu dinners, which is supported by thick metal pipes. Deep blue panelling collars the ceiling, rather than the base, of the central gallery: General State of Judgement and Concern. Its velvety hue is a pleasing touch, making the space a little cosier, and easier to imagine these objects in a living room. The patina on the tortured metal sheet in the light fitting Explosion Proof is so appealing—was there an explosion or is it to signify antiquity, accelerated for your convenience? It’s not all to my taste though. Chair [ …

At a recent film screening in Zurich, an artist whose work was about to be premiered half-joked about the emergent trend of updating exhibition press releases with references to the recent US presidential election and the theme of imminent universal doom left behind by November’s stunning outcome. Suddenly, there’s a sense not so much of urgency but rather of creeping sickness and apathy, spreading from Chelsea to South Beach, a pandemic making its way to Europe’s art hubs. It’s actually been quite some time—not since the aftermath of 9/11, broadly speaking—since any event in US history has had so dramatic an effect on artistic high-end manufacturing and its discourse, not to mention the economic repercussions yet to be determined (by, on the one hand, headlines such as “Ivanka Trump Loves Contemporary Art, Does It Love Her Back?” which recently appeared on artmarketmonitor.com, and the pick of a scion of the founder one of Manhattan’s most exclusive blue-chips for Secretary of the Treasury on the other). It remains to be seen to what extent and by what means the contemporary art world is prepared to address and defy long-term (i.e., a minimum of four years) systemic impoverishment in light of new economic …

Heike-Karin Föll’s exhibition nests within Rochelle Feinstein’s concurrent, longer-running show at Galerie Francesca Pia. The pragmatic arrangement suits, because modesty is Föll’s camouflage, starting with the conditions of the exhibition. At the gallery entrance are 4 notebooks in a vitrine, while the remainder of the works are in a side gallery: 2 works from 2014 made with pressed plants; 5 larger paintings; and a grid of 27 works on paper, each sheet A4. Taking the paintings to be top of the hierarchical tree by the standards of the traditional canon, the first encounter is with refresh (2016), roughly a square meter and a half of calm black scrubbing, pulling color across the canvas, with occasional moments of relief in scratches and uncovered areas where delicate blue, yellow, or violet can be made out. A copy of British Vogue collaged to the right of the canvas is obscured but for the headline “refresh,” which can be read vertically. Magazine clippings and the imprint of an N floating towards the top of the canvas are the kind of text that circulates throughout Föll’s works, sometimes typed on a computer, sometimes written, often in transfer letters. This text is portable and inconclusive; letters toy …

“La Demeure Joyeuse II” or “The Happy Home II” is the first show in Francesca Pia’s new space in the Löwenbräuareal, Zürich’s hub for contemporary art. It’s no wonder the mood is optimistic, though the title refers not to this specific setting but to an exhibition of the same name at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1953 that provided a platform for the textile designs of Paule Marrot in the company of selected friends from the fields of ceramic and interior design. In Zürich, curator Anne Dressen has now gathered some thirty or so artists and designers who cite the domestic or create objects affiliated with domestic space, and in so doing has also queried what role craft plays in art production. At stake here are the relative values of media, skilled craftsmanship, and art (as opposed to design or decoration). Or, on the other hand, can those valuations be ignored to produce a productive tangle of disciplines? Leisurely domesticity meets workspace at the entrance to the show: the N°28 fat knit hammock (2006) by Bless, formed from oversized woven snakes of fat black polyester and nylon, strung across a corner. This hammock faces the gallery’s front desk, …