Artists

Ilona Ruegg

Press release

We are excited to invite you to the opening of Ilona Ruegg's upcoming solo exhibition, Blanks and Possibles, at sentiment on September 10. The exhibition brings together sculptural and site-specific works that extend the bold artistic practice Ruegg has developed since the late 1990s. Ruegg is a pioneering figure among her generation working with industrial materials and found objects in this scale. Blanks and Possibles explores reality and its nuances, shifting between original and copy, real and fake, true and false. These questions take on renewed urgency today, as digital technologies and political narratives increasingly blur such distinctions. * Ilona Ruegg (b. 1949, Rapperswil, Switzerland) is a visual artist working across sculpture, installation, and photography. Her practice engages with architecture, display, and systems of representation, often employing serial structures and modular forms to explore spatial perception and the conditions of exhibition-making. Through precise, reduced interventions, her work examines the relationship between object, image, and environment. Over the course of her career, she has received several prestigious honors, including the Prix Meret Oppenheim (2001), the Recognition Prize of the Kulturstiftung UBS (2004 and 2013), and the Prix Visarte for Art and Architecture (2023). Earlier on, she was awarded the Louise Aeschlimann Scholarship and a residency at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome, both in 1984. Ruegg's work has been presented in numerous important institutions, including the Swiss Institute in New York, Kunsthalle Bern, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, Kunsthalle Arbon, Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Shedhalle Rote Fabrik in Zurich, and Aargauer Kunsthaus, among others. Her works are held in major public and private collections.