Artsy Editorial highlights five standout exhibitions at small and rising galleries for May 2026. Among them is British-born, Amsterdam-based painter K. T. Kobel's first major Swiss show, "Hand, Body, Object, Sin," at Kutlesa in Goldau, Switzerland, running through May 29. Kobel, who has exhibited from Los Angeles to Milan since 2022, presents cinematic, storyboard-like paintings that embrace fragmentation and loose ends.
From 26 April 2026 to 10 January 2027, the Vincenzo Vela Museum in Ligornetto, Switzerland, presents "Bertille Bak: Voices from the Earth," the first major solo exhibition in Switzerland of French artist Bertille Bak. The show brings together works from the past fifteen years that combine cinema, visual arts, and field research, focusing on marginalized communities and themes of labor, identity, and resistance. Bak, born in Arras in 1983, creates video installations and narrative devices through long immersions in communities, with her work held in collections such as the Centre Pompidou and the Collection François Pinault.
The Swiss Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale pays tribute to Lisbeth Sachs (1914–2002), one of Switzerland's first licensed women architects, by recreating her 1958 kunsthalle design inside the pavilion originally built by Bruno Giacometti. The exhibition, titled "Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt," is curated by an all-woman team—Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, and Myriam Uzor—and resurrects a structure Sachs built for the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women's Work (SAFFA) in Zürich, of which almost no trace remains today.