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Palomino Magazine

MAZE Art Gstaad & St. Moritz 2025 — Art Across the Swiss Alps

The Story

MAZE approaches the international art fair from a different perspective. Founded in 2024 by Thomas Hug, the former director of artgenève, the platform brings together a constellation of smaller international salons dedicated to fine art, sculpture, design, photography, video and visual culture.

Rather than concentrating everything within a single large fair, MAZE moves between cities and destinations. Its programme has developed through Gstaad, St. Moritz, Basel, Paris, Vienna and Milan, with each salon shaped by its location and particular artistic focus. Around thirty selected galleries typically participate, creating a format deliberately more intimate than the scale of the major international fairs.

In February 2025, that journey crossed the Swiss Alps.

MAZE Art Gstaad took place from 14 to 16 February, bringing international galleries to the Bernese Oberland. Contemporary art shared the programme with modern art, decorative arts and design, with established international galleries appearing alongside more specialised presentations.

Only a few days later, MAZE continued eastwards to St. Moritz. From 20 to 23 February, the Engadin edition brought another dimension to the project, with photography playing a significant role in the presentations.

The connection between the two locations is particularly relevant to the MAZE concept. Gstaad and St. Moritz have very different identities, yet both have long attracted an international audience around culture, hospitality and the arts. Here, the journey between destinations becomes part of the experience itself.

Thomas Hug brings considerable experience to this format. Before founding MAZE, he spent eleven years directing artgenève and also established artmonte-carlo. With MAZE, the emphasis has shifted towards a network of more focused encounters: galleries, works and collectors brought together at particular moments and in carefully chosen places.

The result is an art journey rather than simply another date on the international fair calendar.

Official Gallery

Official photography: © Torbjørn Rødland — Funeral Home, 2015–2023
Presented by Air de Paris
MAZE Art St. Moritz, 2025

My Editorial Experience

My visit began in Gstaad.

Walking along the main streets of the village, MAZE appeared naturally within the rhythm of the destination. Outside, Gstaad retained its familiar winter character; inside, the atmosphere changed into a succession of galleries, objects and artistic languages.

I moved through the different presentations without trying to follow a predetermined route. Paintings, sculpture, design and contemporary works created their own sequence, with each gallery offering another reason to stop and look more closely.

This is one of the pleasures of a smaller art salon. There is time to observe the works, but also to notice the people around them. Collectors, gallery representatives, artists and visitors share the same relatively intimate environment, and conversations can develop naturally around what is being shown.

I also had the pleasure of meeting again an artist I already knew, whose work and presence became part of my photographic account of the event. These personal encounters give an art fair another dimension: behind the objects are artists, ideas and individual stories.

A few days later, the journey continued in St. Moritz.

The setting changed completely. The Engadin landscape and the architecture of the Reine Victoria created another context for viewing art, while MAZE retained the same idea of bringing galleries and visitors together on a human scale.

I photographed less in St. Moritz, but that difference is also part of this story. The two visits were not identical assignments to be documented in equal measure. Together they became two stages of the same journey through the Swiss winter.

There is something particularly rewarding about encountering art in places such as Gstaad and St. Moritz. The exhibitions and vernissages bring together people who are genuinely interested in art, while the surrounding destinations contribute their own architecture, history and atmosphere.

For me, this is where MAZE works particularly well: not by competing with the scale of the largest international fairs, but by creating occasions to look, meet and discover.

From Gstaad to St. Moritz, the art remains the reason for the journey — but the journey becomes part of the story.

Palomino Gallery