PRESENTATION: Christine Streuli-Upscape

Christine Streuli captivates with her use of bright colors and complex layering, making her paintings oscillate between a conceptual approach and intuition, with intricate patterns and hints of figuration. There is no hierarchy in her paintings; arabesques and geometric structures exist within an autonomous yet interconnected system. Each painting is a singular entity, where every element carries its own presence, balancing tension and harmony in an orchestration of form, color, and movement.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Peter Kilchman Archive

Christine Streuli doesn’t just paint—she stages events. Her canvases are charged with movement, color, and energy, created through pouring, spraying, sprinkling, and layering pigment in ways that stretch the very definition of painting. Sometimes she rakes across the surface, sometimes she uses stencils, sometimes she lets paint accumulate until it forms its own language of drips, spatters, and traces of speed. For her, painting is physical and alive, a space where time, gesture, and intensity are made visible. In exhibitions, her works rarely stop at the edge of the canvas. Walls themselves become part of the experience, covered in expansive murals that merge with her paintings and draw viewers into immersive, almost overwhelming environments. Her sense of scale asserts presence—paintings that can feel tender and subtle when viewed up close shift into something monumental when seen from afar. Her new exhibition, “Upscape”, takes its title from a word she invented, combining “up” with “scape.” The result suggests both landscape and worldview, as well as an upward impulse—a call to rise. The show asks a question that feels both timeless and urgent: “What does it mean to paint landscapes in 2025?” For Streuli, landscapes are not just scenic views. They are everything that surrounds us—plants, water, air, earth, and energy—entangled with human influence. Through abstraction and symbolism, a brushstroke might become a wave, a blot a globe, a circle the moon, a gradient the slow fade of sunset. Her works move fluidly between figuration and abstraction, opening space for multiple interpretations. The exhibition begins gently, with a series called “Unpainting”. Nine small, pastel-colored works are hung against a bold, rainbow-like wallpaper. The canvases are quiet—soft pinks and lilacs fading into white—yet within them are layered forms: drips that look like waves, patterns that shift into branches, sunbursts, or fences. The contrast between these subtle paintings and the flamboyant wallpaper behind them introduces one of the show’s central themes: opposites held in tension. The wallpaper itself is based on microscopic images of the hormone testosterone—an image of beauty that also carries associations with power, aggression, and conflict. From there, the exhibition expands into large, colorful canvases that pull viewers into dystopian dreamscapes. Suns flicker in darkened skies, jellyfish-like forms drift across geometric backgrounds, globes spin in fractured terrains. A painting like “Daily_news_03” hints at melting ice and environmental collapse, while “Scape_Desert_01” radiates the warmth of a summer sunset, layered with dunes and waves of color. Beauty and destruction sit side by side—captivating yet unsettling. The final room brings back the testosterone motif, this time framing works on paper. Each piece interacts differently with the crystalline patterns of the hormone, producing combinations that feel at once scientific and playful, precise yet unpredictable. With “Upscape,” Streuli invites us into a world of opposites: attraction and repulsion, ecstasy and despair, harmony and disruption. Her landscapes are not idyllic retreats but reflections of the world we live in—beautiful, fragile, and under pressure. Yet through the force of her colors and gestures, she reminds us of painting’s power to hold complexity and keep beauty alive, even in moments of uncertainty.

Photo left: Christine Streuli, Daily_news_03, 2025, Acrylic and varnish on canvas, 250 x 170 cm (98 ⅜ x 66 ⅞ in.), © Christine Streuli, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchman. Photo right: Christine Streuli, Daily_news_04, 2025, Acrylic and varnish on canvas, 250 x 170 cm (98 ⅜ x 66 ⅞ in.), © Christine Streuli, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchman

Info: Galerie Peter Kilchman, Zahnradstrasse 21, Zurich, Switzerland, Duration: 30/8-25/10/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.peterkilchmann.com/