Sebastian Stadler—Drift

To give insight into the various topics and artists shaping the Art Vontobel Collection, we regularly present changing exhibitions at our headquarters in Zurich. Following our last exhibition, which featured new acquisitions made in recent months, we are excited to present Drift, a solo exhibition by Swiss/Finnish Collection artist Sebastian Stadler (b. 1988, St. Gallen), whose work challenges habitual ways of seeing and questions our understanding of what is “real.”

Moving attentively through everyday environments, Stadler creates images that appear familiar yet subtly unsettled, capturing moments and situations often overlooked. His work does not seek immediate clarity, but invites a slower, more reflective mode of looking, questioning how we perceive, interpret, and orient ourselves within a reality that is increasingly fragmented and mediated.

Combining still and moving imagery, this exhibition brings together earlier and recent bodies of work, allowing ideas, motifs, and processes to drift across time and form. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the works enter into dialogue, revealing how Stadler’s concerns and practice evolve through repetition, duration, and chance. Finished, framed photographs are shown alongside unfinished test prints, foregrounding the artistic process itself—from one visual idea to the next, and from conceptual exploration to the physical act of printing. Blending analogue and digital approaches, photography appears here not as a fixed result, but as a mutable, experimental medium.

Stadler’s work resonates closely with the core intentions of the Art Vontobel Collection, dedicated to photography and image-based art as a means of exploring the human experience in a rapidly changing world. Testing the limits of the medium while remaining grounded in its material and historical foundations, the artist poetically probes how contemporary photographers seek new visual languages—and how machine-generated image-making subtly reshapes perception.