Avery Singer Turns a Zürich Gallery Into a Casino: 'War_overlays' at Hauser & Wirth

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 12, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Avery Singer Turns a Zürich Gallery Into a Casino: 'War_overlays' at Hauser & Wirth At a Glance Cross town for it: Avery Singer's new paintings hang inside a built casino, the one room designed to defeat the slow looking a painting asks for. Walk up to the second floor of Hauser & Wirth on Limmatstrasse and the room itself has changed. For “War_overlays,” the show that opened June 12 and runs to September 5, Avery Singer has had the upstairs gallery rebuilt into something close to a casino. The gallery’s own announcement calls it a “space reminiscent of a casino,” “a charged environment shaped by surveillance.” She did not hang paintings in a white cube. She built a different room and put them inside it. It opened into Zurich Art Weekend , June 12 to 14, so the timing is easy. Why Avery Singer staged the paintings in a casino, not a white cube A casino is the most engineered room most people ever stand in, and every choice in it does one job: keep a body in the room, keep it moving, keep it from noticing time. No windows. No clocks. Light that never changes and never says what hour it is. Carpet patterned loud enough to keep the eye unsettled and the body slightly off balance. It is the exact opposite of the steady, neutral, daylight-grade condition a painting is normally given so it can be read slowly and held still. So a painter reads this hang as a provocation. Singer has staged her surfaces in the one environment built to prevent the kind of looking paintings ask for. The even frontal wall wash is gone. The room works against the picture on purpose, and the friction is the content. A casino watches everyone in it, and the paintings draw on post-2001 warfare imagery, the surveilled and mediated kind. The room turns a viewer into the watched, while they try to read pictures of the watched. She didn’t hang paintings in a casino. She built the casino, then made the paintings the only thing worth looking at inside it. That is harder than it sounds. Most installation spectacle drowns the paintings and turns them into set dressing. The real test in this room is whether the canvases stay load-bearing while the architecture is shouting. Singer’s surfaces, airbrushed greyscale built from digital models, are cold and engineered enough to hold their own against an engineered room rather than dissolve into it. What the poker player and the AI overlays are doing The recurring figure is a poker player, and the gallery is direct that she stands in for the artist: someone “reading patterns, anticipating risk and perceiving what others might overlook.” That is the method stated plainly. Singer has moved off animation software and now uses open-source and AI tools to pull images out of two decades of contemporary war, then layers them into the composition as overlays. A picture gets assembled the way a hand of cards gets read, by someone deciding which fragments to keep and which to fold. Cross town for this one. Singer