Bobby Pickett Plays the Hits: Banks Violette

Bernheim Gallery is proud to announce Bobby Pickett Plays the Hits, a major solo exhibition by Banks Violette and the most significant presentation of the artist's work in Switzerland to date. The exhibition centres on a monumental, site-specific sculptural installation, presented alongside a new body of works on paper. The show arrives at a defining moment in one of contemporary art's most compelling and necessary returns.

Opening Reception: Friday, 12 June | 6–8 PM

Exhibition Dates: 12 June – 24 July, 2026

Location: Bernheim, Rämistrasse 31, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland

The question that Rachel Wetzler's Artforum essay posed — why does this work feel, in 2026, not nostalgic but prescient? — is the central question of this new exhibition. Violette's practice has always been animated by a diagnosis: that American culture is haunted by its own underbelly, that the spaces of subcultural life, the basement venue, the black stage, the burning church, contain truths about national identity that the mainstream culture expels and disavows. This is not work that comments on the present from a safe critical distance. It is work that was formed inside the American experience of damage and has never left it. In a period of resurgent authoritarianism, cultural backlash, and the spectacular collapse of institutional credibility, Violette's burned churches, blown-out stages, and salt-encrusted mirrors, the residue of rituals conducted in the dark, by people the culture preferred not to see, feel less like art history and more like a field report.