28th International Contemporary Art Fair „Kunst Zürich 23“
25–29 October 23
Ricarda-Huch-Strasse
8050 Zürich/Oerlikon

Halle 550

Booth B1

Preview 25.10. 4 pm - 9 pm
Vernissage 26.10. 4 am - 8 pm
Fr/Sa 27./28.10. 11 am - 8 pm
So 29.10. 11 am -7 pm

To view or download a list with all artworks and prices and inquiries please click here.


BARK BERLIN GALLERY is thrilled to announce that the Gallery is part of this year's @kunstzuerich, as the event marks its 28th anniversary as Zurich's most established art fair. We invite you to visit us at booth B1, where we are proudly presenting the works of four remarkable artists hailing from the rainforests of Argentina, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Berlin. We look forward to your visit and hope you relish the fair. Your presence would be a delightful addition!BARK BERLIN GALLERY is thrilled to announce that Verena Kerfin is part of this year's @kunstzuerich, as the event marks its 28th anniversary as Zurich's most established art fair. We invite you to visit us at booth B1, where we are proudly presenting the works of four remarkable artists hailing from the rainforests of Argentina, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Berlin. We look forward to your visit and hope you relish the fair. Your presence would be a delightful addition!

The gallery is exhibiting works by Lucas Pertile, Karla Marchesi, Ondrej Drescher, and Paul Housley.

Lucas Pertile is an Argentine painter, dividing his time between Buenos Aires and the northern rainforests of Argentina with his family. In the heart of the rainforest, they have a wooden house that also serves as his studio, carrying on a tradition that dates back to his grandfather, who was also a painter.
The rainforest is a vast, colorful, and vibrant organism teeming with life, where the constant cycle of birth and decay is palpable. Lucas's art radiates this vitality with its intense colors and spontaneity. His work is both narrative and gestural, echoing the same dynamism he witnesses daily on the veranda of his rainforest home.
His subjects often feature monkeys, panthers, and birds, creatures that, much like humans, define their existence through relationships within their environment. Lucas infuses his art with the rich narrative cultural heritage of South America, creating a fantastical reinterpretation and mythic shift of these relationships. In his paintings, animals resemble humans, and humans resemble animals, their beauty and enchanting actions intertwining.
I'm excited to present small-format pieces by Lucas at the Zurich Oerlikon fair. Working with Lucas's art always brings me joy, and I hope you'll experience the same when you view his work.

Karla Marchesi, born in Australia and now residing in Berlin, is an incredibly skilled painter who possesses the unique ability to craft complex visual arrangements with an unusually light touch. She strikes an elegant balance between classical aesthetics and subjects, while maintaining a light, unpretentious surface with a touch of irony. It's a captivating blend.
Karla enjoys weaving stories into her work. In her recent pieces, which were showcased both in Berlin and at the Nicholas Thompson Gallery in Melbourne, she explored the idea of what it would be like if humans were history, much like the dinosaurs, and the next species had their chance to become the new evolutionary superstars. In her imagination, it's the plants and flowers that take center stage as the next superstars.
In her art, the plants tenderly cling to the remnants of humanity, preserving them with care, much like how we display dinosaur bones in museums and create amusing animated videos about them for children.
The ironic appearance, the mysterious glow of the plants, and the spectrum of emotions from tender to eerie in Karla's paintings, in my interpretation, serve as a hidden declaration of love for nature, for humanity, and for being human. It's a hopeful message that we do not dig our own graves.

Ondrej Drescher, a former master student of Professor Neo Rauch in Leipzig, now lives and works in Berlin. He continually surprises me with the vast spectrum of his artistic expression.
Whether it's an abstract painting of an impressive 6-meter size hanging in the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Berlin, created with large, bound brooms in an expressive manner, or the unusual small watercolors I can share with you here, it seems that the artist is not constrained by any particular style. It's as if he doesn't require a specific style to unleash his creative power.
The works at the Kunst Zürich 23 art fair here in beautiful Oerlikon depict dreamlike scenes where women seem to interact with horses in slow motion. They stand there dreamily at night, side by side with a friend, a protector, a loyal companion. The horses appear to become visible only at night, as a desire, as a hope.
The nocturnal theme also runs through the three pieces on the outer side of the BARK BERLIN GALLERY booth at the fair. A partial solar eclipse momentarily transforms the world into the realm of dreams and the night. It's a dizzying suspension, a character from Hans Christian Andersen's universe of cut-paper silhouettes. Everything gently melds into the soft canvas of slumber, simultaneously gentle and wide awake.

I'm absolutely thrilled to introduce you to an exceptional British painter, Paul Housley. Based in London, Paul is a well-known figure in the art world, and rightfully so.
His works possess a wonderful, rugged, and raw texture. This surface is a composite of brush marks, layers of overpainting, colorful imprints of fingers on the canvas edges, the translucence of the canvas itself, and the materializing colors that stir the viewer when contemplating his paintings.
Paul paints everything. Scenes from books, scenes from newspapers, from his memory, or as he wishes to remember them. His paintings are a panoply of timelessness. Much like Virginia Woolf's character Orlando, he seems to travel as a painter wherever he pleases, whenever he pleases, and most importantly, at any point in time.
Instead of photographs, he brings back paintings from his intellectual journeys. Opera ushers, seafarers - pirates, perhaps? On an island, boxers, or punks; he visits them all and paints them.
For me, the greatness of painting lies in its liberation from realistic constraints, allowing us to explore the breathtaking expanses of the human intellectual world. Just as Umberto Eco spoke of the library as something alive, surely all the images created over the past 10,000 years are an integral part of this living, intellectual, and emotional entity. Paul is a friend to this living, intellectual, and emotional being.