Galerie Eva Presenhuber

The day that Zurich’s spectacularly repurposed industrial zone Kreis 5 won credibility as a new world-class contemporary art hub was the day Eva Presenhuber opened the doors of her new gallery there. Formerly a business partner of all-conquering artworld leviathan Hauser & Wirth, the prodigiously high-achieving, Austrian-born Presenhuber is one of contemporary art’s most closely watched arbiters. The voluminous gallery she opened in 2011 is in the Diagonal building, a former early 1900s industrial warehouse at the heart of the area’s prestigious, starchitect-led redevelopment. There she stunned her peers with her choices of experimental and seemingly uncommercial new talents alongside established stars of today’s contemporary scene – Urs Fischer, Amy Granat and Valentin Carron, who was selected to show in Switzerland’s pavilion at 2013’s Venice Biennale, are regular collaborators. Her brave, uncompromising curatorial judgement was more than vindicated a year later when she opened a sister space around the corner in Limmatsrasse’s Lowenbrau-Areal complex. Expect her shows to leave you confronted and thrilled.