Please join us for the opening reception on Friday, 5 September 2025, from 18:00 to 21:00, and the closing reception on Tuesday, 30 September 2025, from 18:00 to 21:00, in the presence of Marco Habrik and Arthur Heck.
This selection of photographs spans several decades and is inspired by a love affair that began on a sunny day by Lake Zurich in the summer of 1994. The collection captures the tenderness and vulnerability of queer intimacy through the lens of celebrated photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Walter Pfeiffer, Herbert List, Jack Pierson, David Armstrong, Greg Gorman, and Ryan McGinley, among others.
Since 2000, Marco Habrik has built an extensive photography collection featuring both emerging and established artists such as works by Walter Pfeiffer, Augustin Rebetez, Shirana Shahbazi, Anthony Goicolea, Ren Hang, Ryan McGinley, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Torbjørn Rødland, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Bruce Weber. The collection also highlights photographers from the Boston School and New York’s downtown scene, such as David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Mark Morrisroe, and Jack Pierson.
In this exhibition, Habrik presents a curated selection from his collection in conversation with Heck’s contemporary works.
In dialogue with the historical works, Arthur Heck presents a recent body of work that continues the exploration of intimacy—its ephemerality, its emotional charge, and its inevitable fading. His photographs are quiet yet powerful meditations on the traces left behind by love and desire.
Arthur Heck (b. 2000, FR; lives and works in Zurich) earned his Master’s degree with distinction from the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in 2024, following a Bachelor’s from Haute École des Arts du Rhin in 2022. His recent solo exhibitions include Amiamo Caffè (2024) and Fomo Art Space (2023), with group shows at Hotel Tiger, Anggrek Agency, ZHdK, Istituto Svizzero (Milan), and ETH Zurich.
In his recent body of work, Heck depicts intimate moments—fleeting, tender, and layered with unspoken meaning. Beneath the surface of passion and connection lies an undercurrent of disappearance and loss. As summer’s fiery heat can often ignite intense love stories, these works reflect not only the blazing spark of affection but also the inevitable aftermath: the ashes left behind when those moments fade. A quiet testament to the traces left after love’s initial combustion—the warmth of a fleeting touch, the fading echo of laughter, the lingering memory of an embrace, tinder is as flammable as the hearts of lovers.
Herbert List, Ritti with Fising Rod, Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, 1937
Ryan McGinley, Green Crash, 2013
Ryan McGinley, Green Crash, 2013
Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 1980
Alexandre Haefeli, Boy in Stripes, 2015
Shirana Shahbazi, Diver-01-2011, 2011
Arthur Heck, In My Room #3, 2025
Arthur Heck, Rotting in the Sun, 2024