Image: Kunsthaus Zug, Zug
Kunsthaus Zug has opened ‘Träumende Dinge – Heidi Bucher, Miriam Cahn, Meret Oppenheim, Hannah Villiger, Ilse Weber u. a.’, a summer exhibition running from June 13 to September 27, 2026. The show brings together works by a wide group of artists, with an emphasis on Swiss women artists, and uses dream imagery as a way to rethink bodies, objects and the history of art.
The museum describes the exhibition as a focus on artists whose work is present in its collection but whose position has often been overshadowed by more male-dominated art-historical narratives. According to the exhibition text, ‘Träumende Dinge’ looks at works and bodies of work that circle around things and bodies, transforming the familiar into something strange, symbolic and newly charged. The museum frames dream not as escape, but as a method for thinking differently about material, biography and art history.
The exhibition’s approach places it in a strong art-historical line linked to Surrealism, while also widening that reference beyond a single movement. The museum cites Ilse Weber’s remark, ‘I would like to paint something I have never seen before,’ as a concise summary of the exhibition’s logic. In the exhibition context, that statement stands for the creation of dreamlike image worlds in which objects are detached from ordinary use and given new meaning. The result is described as a surreal poetics in which everyday things appear to develop an independent life.
Among the artists named are Heidi Bucher, Miriam Cahn, Meret Oppenheim, Hannah Villiger, Ilse Weber, Judith Albert, Helen Balmer, Anna Margrit Annen, Trudi Demut, Livia Gnos, Rut Himmelsbach, Maya Hottarek, Irma Ineichen, Annemie Lieder, Brigitte Moser, Klaudia Schifferle, Lou Stengele, Annelies Štrba, Josephine Troller, Annelies Ursin and Eva Wipf. The exhibition is curated by Jana Bruggmann. Kunsthaus Zug also notes support from the Max Kohler Stiftung, the Katholische Kirchgemeinde Zug, Einwohnergemeinde Baar and the Casimir Eigensatz Stiftung in Lucerne.
The museum’s online collection materials highlight Meret Oppenheim as a key reference point for the show. Oppenheim’s ‘Urzeit Venus’ is presented as a bronze from 1978, with the museum tracing the work back to an original 1933 idea formed in the context of Parisian Surrealism. The collection text describes Oppenheim’s wider practice as spanning object art, painting and drawing, and places her among the major artists of modernism. That makes her presence in the exhibition significant not only as a local collection highlight, but as part of a broader reassessment of how women artists helped shape surreal and post-surreal visual languages.
The museum has also linked the exhibition to family and learning activities in a dedicated mediation space called ‘Weiterträumen,’ where visitors can play, create, contribute and linger. For children in the GGZ Ferienpass programme, Kunsthaus Zug is offering ‘Malen auf Leinwand’ across several July dates. In a museum context that includes a major collection focus on Swiss Surrealism and Fantastical Realism, ‘Träumende Dinge’ matters because it turns that collecting history into a present-tense exhibition about perception, agency and the artistic transformation of the everyday.
