It is not every day that passengers can encounter work by Chris Ofili, Wolfgang Tillmans and Max Ernst at the airport. Yet at Gstaad-Saanen Airport, Tarmak22 has made contemporary art a regular arrival. Named after the runway it overlooks, the exhibition space was founded in 2019 by Antonia Crespí and Tatiana de Pahlen. Its late summer show, ‘How to Dance in Flower Fields’, takes the plants of the surrounding Alps as its subject.
Curated by Crespí, the exhibition begins with the flower fields of the Saanenland, the Alpine region surrounding Gstaad. Artworks appear alongside botanical drawings and preserved specimens from archives in Zurich, Geneva and Bern. The local subject draws an international cast: Ofili, Tillmans and Ernst are joined by Yves Tanguy, Franz Gertsch, Chiara Camoni, Álvaro Urbano and Monica Ursina Jäger.
Löwenbrücke (Sambucus), 2026, by Álvaro Urbano
Chiara Camoni’s Piatto series
German biologist Ernst Haeckel provides the backbone to the show. He coined the word ‘ecology’ in 1866 and published Kunstformen der Natur, a collection of studies of plants and animals. His drawings turn scientific observation into images of startling intricacy. In the showcase, they explain why a flower can be evidence, artwork and object of wonder.
Dried gentians from the United Herbaria of the University and ETH Zurich bring the local landscape indoors. Long valued for their medicinal properties, they appear alongside Ofili’s flowering stems and masked pipers. Meanwhile, Max Ernst supplies blooms that could only have grown in the Surrealist imagination, and Tillmans finds tenderness in a photograph of two flowering plants that seem to embrace.
ETH Library’s e-rara collection
The view then narrows from Alpine panorama to forest floor. Gertsch concentrates on grasses, riverbeds and patches of woodland; Urbano makes plants and animals that initially appear real, only for their crafted surfaces to give them away; and Camoni uses grasses and leaves, pressing their forms onto silk until goblins, fairies and xapiri-like guardians emerge. In the two-channel installation Transient Traveller, Jäger follows the passage of botanical knowledge through science, natural materials and storytelling.
Windowbox, 2000, by Wolfgang Tillmans
The archival highlight is Flore des Dames de Genève. Created in 1817, it contains almost 1,000 botanical drawings, largely copied by women whose contribution to scientific knowledge received scant recognition.
‘How to Dance in Flower Fields’ runs from 6 August to 6 September 2026; admission is free. Tarmak22 is located at Gstaad-Saanen Airport, Oeystrasse 29, 3792 Saanen, Switzerland