Galerie Chantal Crousel congratulates Fabrice Gygi on being awarded the Prix Meret Oppenheim.

The Meret Oppenheim Prize was launched in 2001 by the Federal Office of Culture in collaboration with the Federal Art Commission. It honors figures in the fields of art and architecture whose work promotes Swiss artistic creation. The awards are accompanied by financial support.

Ever since the 1990s, working amidst Geneva’s alternative scene and community squats, Fabrice Gygi has been developing an aesthetic of escape. His sculptures, along with watercolours, prints, performances, tattoos and jewellery, interrogate the mechanisms of authority.
Today, having put his installation practice on hold, the artist pursues this iconographic interest in grids through the medium of watercolours criss-crossed by wide, translucent straight lines.
Living between Valais and Geneva, Fabrice Gygi still maintains the close connection with the land and nature that, in his youth, had taken him on a number of solo treks in the far north of Canada. In winter 2026, he will be on the road again. Fabrice Gygi is thus engaged in a quest that runs through all of his work: a search for liberty and a compulsion to escape the confines of a self-imposed prison.
He has featured in large-scale solo exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, notably at MAMCO, Geneva, the Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, the Swiss Institute, New York, among others. He has also been involved in major group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and MoMA PS1, New York. The artist also represented the Swiss Pavilion at the 25^th São Paulo Biennale in 2002 and the 53^rd Venice Biennale in 2009.

The award ceremony will take place on June 15, 2026, in Basel, followed by the exhibition, which will be held from June 16 to 21, 2026, at Messe Basel.

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