Blue Velvet demonstrates how a tightly defined curatorial vision can resist homogenisation in the contemporary art market. Words by Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin.
Since its founding in 2012, Art Genève has become a major cultural site for art professionals, collectors and the public to experience cutting-edge modern and contemporary art. Showcasing over 80 galleries, the fair’s multidisciplinary programme presents a selection of international artists and institutions working with a diversity of forms. There is a music section presenting performances and installations by Monica Bonvincini and Bonnie Banane, accompanied by Joseph Schiano di Lombo; the fair’s Sur-Mesure section, curated by Nicolas Trembley, which features distinctive artworks including Paul McCarthy’s White Snow Head (2012) and Michal Rovner’s arresting film, Red Field (2024); and a space dedicated to art publishers, organised by the Foundation Antoine de Galbert and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Each of these areas reflects something crucial about the fair’s identity and ambition – its role in deepening the dialogue between commercial galleries and art institutions, the global art market and the city’s local community.
The fair model, by nature, places artwork in crowded spaces, within which galleries compete for attention. The greatest challenge in this environment is standing out. Yet, at this year’s Art Genève, one gallery seems almost effortlessly to steal the show: Blue Velvet, a contemporary organisation with a space in Zurich and – since March 2025 – Madrid. Founded in 2021 by Pier Stuker, the gallery is guided by a unique strategy: it represents 10 artists whose practices are each grounded in the subjects of sexuality, mortality, and the tension between fantasy, reality, and desire. Embracing sensual, delicate, Kafkaesque expressions, audiences are drawn to Blue Velvet because of its distinct thesis and evocative visual language.
The first artwork I encounter as part of the display is Adam Cruce’s strange and sensual series of pastel drawings entitled Leda and The Swan (2024). In each artwork, a nude, female figure is shown next to the titular bird: its long, thin neck serving as an obvious phallic object within the psychosexual scene. The artworks are based on a story in Greek mythology, in which Zeus, disguised as a swan, seduces Leda, a Spartan queen. Cruce’s striking depictions of the figure’s erotic tension seamlessly capture the dark tone of this tale; their bluntness – a swan paddling toward the human lover’s open legs (Leda and The Swan); a mouth-to-beak sunset kiss (Leda and The Swan V) – sits somewhere between shock and absurdity, bathos and the sublime.
This approach typifies the tenor of Blue Velvet’s presentation: Cruce’s practice generates an emotional response that is hard to place, embracing conflict and psychological tension. Similarly, the sculptures of Mónica Mays, including Get Ridden (2025), seem to teeter between various states of feeling and representation: uncanny apparatuses that teeter on the edge of human and machine – a sort of umbilical cord or old exhaust pipe.
Julian-Jakob Kneer is another artist shown in the booth whose work deconstructs moral and aesthetic binaries. His sculpture Fanatic (4) (2025), presents a worn, possibly sweat-stained pair of archival Micky Mouse gloves – an object indicating both play and violence – alongside a Precious Moments figurine – a collectable statue depicting Christian children with teardrop-shaped eyes, developed by artist Sam Butcher in 1978. Pairing together untypical, yet visually charged, items, Kneer probes at how readily something like value, notions of beauty, and meaning can shift, interrogating essentialist perspectives. It is tempting to read the sculpture as a fitting conceit, perhaps, for the contemporary art market; how a model driven by financialisation and social media promotion has produced an attention economy that conflates spectacle with substance – or worth – conditions that create a battleground for emerging artists who are competing in a hype-driven industry. Perhaps one method for galleries to distinguish themselves and the identity of their artists is to sustain a specialised, possibly even niche, lens on art. In this instance, Blue Velvet leads the way.
