ISSUES


ABOUT

Instincts and Interests

Francesca Pia ✕ Mitchell Anderson



From 2017—2019, the artist, writer and curator Mitchell Anderson was the director of Galerie Francesca Pia—the by-then groundbreaking and internationally acclaimed Zürich-based art gallery, started in 1990 by Francesca Pia. 

Recognized for a roster and fostered collaborations that includes Fischli and Weiss, Wade Guyton, Mai-Thu Perret, Gili Tal, and Thomas Hirschhorn, exhibitions and decisions were known to be based on instinct rather than institutional motivations or commercial strategies. Francesca Pia, as a gallerist, proved over and over again that she aligned with aesthetic decisions that cultivated and embraced artistic risks. Last June, when it was announced that Galerie Francesca Pia would close at the end of 2025 after thirty five years, Zürich and elsewhere understood that the artworld was changing.

Here, Mitchell Anderson and Francesca Pia join in conversation to consider the start and shifts that made Galerie Francesa Pia an intrinsic part of the Swiss scene and beyond. 


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Mitchell Anderson: So, you opened the gallery in 1990 with Betty Woodman. How did you meet her, and why did you open the gallery?

Francesca Pia : I was actually asked to open a gallery because I was around artists all the time. I had worked at the Kunsthalle Zürich, and there was Susan Wyss. She had a gallery that showed artists like Fischli and Weiss, Kippenberger and she was very close to Parkett. She asked me if I would take over a space in Bern as a second location.
MA: Like a franchise? Under her name?

FP: Under her name, yes. At first I thought it was exciting because I wouldn’t have to make the program myself with two young children and no experience in curating, so that seemed manageable. When I found a space she had changed her mind and wanted to enlarge her space in Zürich instead. At that point I jumped into the water, so to speak. So I had a few months to put together a program.

MA: And why did you begin with the ceramicist Betty Woodman?
FP: At Elka Spoerri’s, I discovered a magazine with works of Betty Woodman. It kind of attracted me as some free way of working with pottery. Against Elka's recommendation, I decided to do it. It was completely different from Minimal Art. I didn’t want to be put into a box when I opened the gallery. I had originally asked Fischli and Weiss, but they weren’t ready that early. So I began with Betty Woodman, followed by Terry Fox.

People in Bern were quite shocked. Many thought I was opening a ceramics gallery because ceramics wasn’t really accepted as contemporary art yet. But artists like Jean-Frédéric Schnyder were fascinated.

MA: That would have been considered risky even in New York City, let alone Bern.

FP: Yes, absolutely.

MA: What was Susan Wyss’s idea with Bern? Was it that it could support a gallery there with a collector base, or were you looking outward of Switzerland?
FP: She had previously lived in Bern. Everything was smaller then. Switzerland wasn’t as interconnected as it is now. We didn’t even have time to discuss the strategy in depth. I simply thought it sounded fun. But there were good collector families and collectors in Bern. 

MA: Did Switzerland feel less centered on Zürich at the time?
FP: It wasn’t as centralized as it is now.

MA: How long did you run the gallery before taking a break when your daughter Lucie was born?

FP: About two years. I slowed down a bit, but not dramatically. In fact, after only two years I was invited to Art Basel.
MA: Already?
 FP: Yes. Pierre Huber—the founder of Art & Public gallery in Geneva—was an important member of the jury who invited me to Art Basel during my early years. But I just had a baby and decided not to do it.
MA: Looking back, I was thinking about this and wondering what was the bigger risk. But now thirty years later, it seems pretty obvious that taking care of Lucie was the right choice!



FP: It was another time. It was my choice. I wasn’t making much money anyway.
MA: But, basically during those first ten years, you did shows when you wanted to. Did you have a clear vision for the gallery?
FP: Not really, I couldn’t describe in words what I was doing. Of course, there was a kind of attitude I shared with artists, but I didn’t have a theoretical framework. I hadn’t studied art. I had simply seen a lot.

The thing was, we had Harald Szeemann in Bern and this was the big moment of inspiration for me. When I was still in school, I saw his famous exhibition When Attitudes Become Form. It was on my route to high school and so I dropped in a few times and became fascinated. At that time my parents were divorcing, I was unhappy and art became something important for me to discover.

MA: It really felt that the world was cycling through Bern at the time.

FP: Absolutely. Later there was Johannes Gachnang, then Ulrich Loock, who brought artists like David Hammons, Michael Asher, and many others. It was a very exciting period.
MA: So—you were always following your instincts, and what you wanted to build during those first ten years? You were just running a project and hoping it paid for itself?
FP: Yes. I was discovering what interested me. I had worked in a very commercial gallery called Gimpel & Hanover in Zürich and shows of artists passed through like Yves Klein and Josef Albers, classical and contemporary.
MA: You originally wanted to be an artist yourself, right?
FP: Yes. I made drawings, mostly. Sometimes little cartoons.
MA: What, really? What kind of cartoons, like with texts?
 FP: No, more just strange situations. Like perhaps a dog, a poodle, melting into the ground. 
MA: You also worked at Marlborough during the Rothko case.
FP: Yes, during the lawsuits, I was having to go to Baur au Lauc as an assistant with short hand English. That was another reason I didn’t enjoy working in a gallery or this idea of being a gallerist. I saw aspects of the art business that made me uncomfortable. It reinforced my desire to do things differently.
MA: I remember you talking about this, witnessing one of the most insane corruption scandals the art world had seen at that point.
 FP: I still remember part of my job was the daily entries in this big book, called the Stockbook. But then overnight suddenly, pages of the Stockbook began to go missing.
MA: Sounds risky.
FP: I guess it had to do with tax issues.
MA: So your gallery emerged partly as a reaction against that world, those early instances of dealing which are very separate from art.

FP: Exactly. I didn’t want to become a dealer in that sense. 
MA: You eventually showed Fischli and Weiss in 1992? Artists like Hans-Peter Feldmann, also very early.

FP: Right, I mean I was really just discovering what I wanted to show. I didn’t have this theoretical vision, I functioned more subconsciously. I was always looking at shows and some magazines, like Parkett and there was one called Wolkenkratzer—it was an interesting magazine in the 1980s and early 90s. There I discovered Hans-Peter Feldmann. At the Cologne Art Fair I asked Walter Koenig if he knew this artist? And Walter said yeah but he doesn’t do art anymore, he runs a souvenir shop, maybe you can give it a try. So he gave me his address and I went over.
MA: You just drove over to his house?
FP: Yeah. That became one of his first exhibitions after returning to art making. I often did things like that—I was always looking around—going to the fairs like in Basel and Cologne, visiting artists, seeing what was happening.
MA: But Feldman felt that he could do a show again with you. He felt comfortable and that it was focused on art.
FP: Exactly. He was like a friend.
MA: And you did Liste Art Fair Basel very early on as well?
 FP: Yes, Peter Bläuer wanted me to come even when I had the feeling I had nothing to show, he was very encouraging, always saying, “You have to come, you will manage.”
MA: You had my favorite artist, Janine Antoni, who you didn’t do a show with but you exhibited her at Liste.

FP: Ah, of course. Yes. I showed her, she was just at the beginning of a career in New York. 
MA: Right, so even with artists you didn’t necessarily show in the gallery, you still worked with them in some way.
 FP: Right, Thomas Hirschhorn for instance. I had his very first show, early in 1991. I discovered a drawing—at his friend’s studio—and I thought it was very strange. I asked him and was told that this artist partly was earning his living as a truck driver in Paris.

I went to visit him in Paris while I went to visit Hannah Villiger. That was also at the start of his practice, and it was an interesting experience, to help an artist at the beginning of his career.
MA: I mean we’re supposed to be talking about risk but I don’t really think that for you it was about taking risks, but about having such a strong sense of an eye or ears to match it. Like with Hirschhorn, you saw it, and could tell. You just felt it?

FP: Yes. I didn’t have a master plan.
MA: When you discover an artist, do you feel it immediately? I know when I find an artist, it is a very specific sensibility to say yes there is something unusual about it, and a feeling that I have to check this out even or especially if I don’t understand it. 
FP: Sometimes. Other times you can’t get the work out of your head. You keep returning to it. That’s often the sign. With Hirschhorn, I realized I didn’t really understand everything and I knew that that’s good in a certain sense. And it was good.
MA: Around 2000, things became more professional. Was that intentional?
FP: That came largely through Mai-Thu Perret and Fabrice Stroun. I met them at Forde, Geneva. We talked endlessly about art and ideas. I asked them if they were interested in some cooperation with artists from the French part of Switzerland. They eventually came to Bern and made the exhibition, Why Can’t Monsters get along with other Monsters.

Mai-Thu, especially, pushed for a more professional structure. She wanted proper installation photography and documentation.
MA: Right, people forget all the time that proper gallery documentation didn’t become necessary really until Contemporary Art Daily was founded in 2008. Before then it was just more proof that something was on the walls, it wasn’t about having installation shots we know of today, just a check list. 
FP: Yeah, it felt really new.
MA: So the gallery evolved together with the artists.
FP: Very much so. And that’s really when we started this system. 
MA: So you were pushed to move towards a traditional gallery format.

FP: Soon after that I was contacted through Mai-Thu and Fabrice by Wade Guyton. At that time I could see his slides. It was so interesting, there was no way for me at that moment to explain the combination of these signs and modernistic aesthetic.
MA: They were the drawings with the houses blacked out?


FP: Yes, exactly and his early X sculpture, or a slide with a triangle in a corner, I really loved this. 
MA: I like this idea that the artists also have power in the relationship. It wasn’t that you discovered him but that he discovered you (through Mai-Thu), rather than the other way around. 

This was also around the time your visibility increased internationally?
 FP: Yes. I was invited to Frieze and saw this list of fantastic galleries but it was too expensive for me. So I went to see some people at the board of the Kunsthalle and I asked them if they appreciated my work in Bern? A person on the board gave me ten thousand francs to go to Frieze and that was the beginning. This seemed to encourage Art Basel to include me.
MA: That sounds crazy now. You did Art Statements with Wade, right? 
FP: Yes, in 2005.
MA: Did you have an employee then? Or were you still, at that point, doing everything yourself?
FP: Shortly before I still did everything more or less alone: shipping, administration, installation, fairs. But that’s how it was for other galleries too. Things were probably a little easier back then.
MA: God, I don’t know. Shipping and customs? You know I don't want to do it.

FP: I once took a sculpture on a plane.
MA: Oh, I still do this. Don’t tell customs! But okay, now the year is 2000. At this point, you're professional—more so than you had been—because of Mai-Thu and the fairs and so on. At that point, did you ever think consciously about building a program?
 FP: I guess like other galleries it developed organically. Some artists stopped making work, some relationships changed, and new artists appeared. For instance, there was this show in Glarus and I discovered Kaspar Mueller there.
MA: Then in 2007 you moved the gallery to Zürich. Why?
FP: Partly because I realized I couldn’t keep artists in Bern. Other gallerists in Zürich saw works by Mai-Thu Perret and Valentin Carron. There was a sense of increasing competition.
MA: Did moving change how you discovered artists?

FP: It changed the generation around me. I had more contact with younger artists. But I still found artists mostly through looking, talking, reading and staying curious. 
MA: What was the biggest risk you took during the gallery’s thirty five years?
FP: Probably taking the large Daros space in Zürich. It was enormous. It required bigger exhibitions, more logistics, more responsibility.
MA: Did you ever regret not showing a particular artist?
FP: There are a few.
MA: One thing that stands out is that you never seemed to compromise your program for commercial reasons.
FP: If I didn’t believe in the work, I couldn’t show it.
MA: When did you know you were going to close the gallery?
 FP: I started to think about it a year before I announced it. We needed to move again, and I couldn’t see a future that made sense. I looked at smaller spaces, but central locations were too expensive.

I also realized I couldn’t afford to continue doing the art fairs like before.
MA: Did the artists understand?
 FP: They were sad, but reacted beautifully.
MA: People often treat gallery closures as failures.
FP: I don’t see it that way. Sometimes it’s simply time. You don’t necessarily want to build everything all over again.
MA: Looking back, do you think fear of failure influenced your decisions?
FP: Of course I was afraid of failure. Everyone is. But I never built my program around avoiding it. I simply tried to stay true to what interested me.
MA: Even when it would have been easier to show more commercially successful artists?

FP: Yes. If I didn’t believe in something, I couldn’t do it. That was always the rule.
MA: Do you miss running the gallery?
FP: Yes of course, I also sometimes miss my team. But I’m happy not to have the constant pressure of making exhibitions and finding money. I’m at peace with the decision.


Mitchell Anderson is an artist involved with belief. Recent solo exhibitions include Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva (2026); Stiftung Binz39, Zurich; Bernheim Gallery, London (both 2025) and Kunsthalle 8000, Wadenswil (2023). He has organized over 60 exhibitions at Plymouth Rock, the Zurich-based independent space he founded in 2014. He is a frequent contributor of essays and criticism to international arts publications, a founding co-curator of the Zurich Biennial and he has lectured on studio practice at the Zurich University of the Arts since 2020.


Francesca Pia opened a gallery 1990 in Bern and has since then consistently fostered important contemporary artists, including positions such as Betty Woodman (1990), Peter Fischli & David Weiss (1992), Hans-Peter Feldmann (1993), Thomas Bayrle (1998), Mai-Thu Perret (2000), Wade Guyton (2004), Jutta Koether (2008) and Rochelle Feinstein (2016) et al. The gallery was known for the discovery and promotion of emerging artists.

After 16 years in Bern, the gallery moved in 2007 to a larger space in Zurich. In 2012 the gallery extended and relocated to a generous space in the historic Löwenbräu building, where it continued to engage in an ambitious program, representing over thirty artists of different generations. She closed the gallery after 35 years in 2025.