Hauser & Wirth Invite(s)

In his abstract passages, Zellweger courts contingency. Painting, he tells me, is sometimes like a game—and when the game gets boring, you make up a new rule. His drawing ‘Snakes and Ladders’ (2019) explicitly refers to a game. Originating in medieval India, ‘Snakes and Ladders’ was originally imbued with moral and religious symbolism: virtue led upwards, vice downwards. In the late 19th century, the board game was colonially adapted by the British, simplified into a model of fate and coincidence [2]. In Zellweger’s version, a green shoe climbs a ladder. The snake itself is absent, while the poison-like color and the shoe’s possible snakeskin texture linger, referring less to an animal than to a deeply anchored symbol within the collective imaginary.

These visual residues and stereotypes interest Zellweger, but they also represent the central challenge of a painter: to overcome the cliché. ‘There is no blank canvas,’ says Deleuze, meaning that the field is saturated with norms, images and assumptions even before the first brushstroke [3]. The figure in ‘New Note,’ dozing over the blank page, seems momentarily to escape this burden. Yet the challenge of confronting the cliché persists in ‘Stand out’ (2025), where a chameleon perches on a branch, its tongue extended toward the frame, as if testing the limits of the image itself. In Western iconography, the chameleon is frequently associated with adaptability, disguise, and duplicity, serving as an emblem of opportunism and neoliberal ideology. Zellweger, however, subverts this symbolic charge. As in nature, the animal’s chromatic shifts correspond to internal states—stress, excitement, alertness—rather than environmental camouflage. This chameleon does not conceal itself; it communicates. Its mode of visual expression is strikingly immediate and echoes the operations of painting itself.

An early and radical model for such reflexive strategies in painting is Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts’ ‘Reverse of a Framed Painting’ (1670), a hyperreal depiction of a canvas’s back, including nails, shadows and the frame, rendered with trompe-l’œil precision. It shows ‘nothing,’ and yet everything: a painting about painting, reduced to its backside. The art historian Victor I. Stoichita calls this a founding gesture of meta-painting – a looped reflection on the image and its terms [4]. Zellweger’s own ‘reverse’ takes up this tradition, but not through illusion. ‘Untitled (verso)’ (2025) does not seek to fool the viewer or display technical prowess. Instead, it functions as a conceptual trick, referencing Gijsbrechts through irony, historical awareness and a contemporary perspective.

In his work, Zellweger exposes its mechanics without collapsing into narrative or discourse, revealing the painter’s capacity, in Deleuze’s terms, to evade clichés, to render forces visible, and to unlock the potential therein. The power lies not in what is depicted, but in what is activated. The inevitable distance between idea and form always produces a kind of irritation, and in recognizing this distortion, the painter’s potential emerges. His abstract forms, like the gridded, caged geometries in ‘Outbreak IV’ (2022) and ‘Outbreak VI’ (2025), attempt to represent something that cannot be found elsewhere. What happens in the between – after nodding off, before waking disoriented? Proust writes that the sleeper ‘holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds’[5]. This circular time may be inaccessible, but the trick, the moment of in-between, allows brief access. Not to transcendence, but to something embedded, already present. Between sleep and action, figuration and field, reference and abstraction, Zellweger’s works generate zones of oscillation. They move. His paintings don’t declare but ask; don’t resolve but unfold. They are non-illusionistic, non-discursive, non-didactic. Not in search of clarity, they open a space for perception—without rules, without tropes. A visual language, perhaps, for living with contradiction, or, for navigating the absurd.

—Eleonora Bitterli

(translated from German)

_{[1] Gilles Deleuze, ‘Sur la peinture. Cours, mars–juin 1981,’ ed. Anne Sauvagnargues (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2023), p. 78. Lectures held in 1981.
[2] For a historical overview of ‘Snakes and Ladders,’ see Andrew Topsfield, ‘The Indian Game of Snakes and Ladders,’ Artibus Asiae 4, no. 3 (1985): 203–226.
[3] See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Sur la peinture’ (2023), p. 43.
[4] Victor I. Stoichita, ‘The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting,’ trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1997), p. 291. First published 1993.
[5] Marcel Proust, ‘In Search of Lost Time,’ trans. Lydia Davis, Vol. 1: Swann’s Way (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 5. First published 1913.}