Urban Zellweger paints directly onto pizza boxes, altering their printed surfaces through layers of pigment that soften or dissolve their commercial imagery. The resulting works resemble quiet interior or landscape scenes, shaped by careful overpainting and subtle tonal shifts. His use of disposable packaging underscores an interest in how materials accumulate traces of daily life.

Zellweger’s paintings draw attention to the emotional presence embedded in ordinary objects. Through muted palettes and atmospheric handling, he creates images that evoke fading impressions and residual moods. The works offer a contemplative engagement with memory as it settles into familiar forms.

Urban Zellweger recently held solo exhibtions at Hauser and Wirth, Zurich and CAN - Centre d‘art Neuchâtel. Recent group exhibitions include Bechtler Stiftung; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunstverein Nürn- berg; Instituto Svizzero, Milan; LUMA foundation, Zurich, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo.

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The pizza box is nostalgic, a vestige of a time before the current panoply of contactless food delivery. It is Fast Times at Ridgemont High and a comforting caricature of Italy: immediately recognizable, desirable and discardable. Urban Zellweger gathers all of this up in his Pizzaboxes series, as he primes the box’s square cardboard lids like canvases and paints them in oil. He started collecting pizza boxes in spring 2020: initially from pizzas he’d ordered and eaten, later directly from pizzerias with designs he found intriguing. The series is inscribed in Zellweger’s consideration of painting as an object, which also informed a series of painted curtain-like cloth works that he began working on around the same time. The Pizzaboxes take on painting as a commodity, questioning its consumable status. There is no pizza inside of a painting.

Zellweger obscures the boxes original design in painted clouds, recasting it as an apparition barely visible through a thick fog. Like a daydream of looking up and seeing PIZZA written in the sky. A recurrent landscape of pines and hints of mountains socked in hazy white is at odds with the traces of red and green brandished on the boxes, transporting the works into a mystical realm. As the Pizzaboxes series continues to evolve, Zellweger pushes his painting practice, taking his playfully inventive pictorial world to new dimensions.

– Camila McHugh