Galerie Peter Kilchmann has opened the first exhibition devoted to Walter Grab, a Swiss painter whose work has remained little known outside a small circle of specialists. Walter Grab (1927–1989) – Zurich Surrealist opened at the gallery's Zahnradstrasse space in Zurich on 28 October and runs to 19 December 2026, gathering around 30 paintings made between the 1950s and the 1980s.

Grab, who lived from 1927 to 1989, is presented by the gallery as one of the most remarkable yet relatively little-known representatives of Swiss Surrealism. The works on view trace his development from the 1950s onwards, through three decades in which Swiss art was redefining itself after the war. The selection offers the most substantial overview of his practice yet mounted by a commercial gallery, and a chance to judge how his imagery developed across the post-war decades.

Interest in Grab has been building slowly: a comprehensive catalogue of his works was published in 2022, edited by Julia Schallberger, Christoph Kappeler and André Grab. The Kilchmann show is framed as a next step in that reassessment — an attempt to give an important but insufficiently recognised voice within Swiss Surrealism a renewed platform and a wider audience. For a painter who died in 1989 without the international exposure of his better-known peers, the show is a belated introduction rather than a retrospective in the usual sense.

The exhibition opens alongside a group show at the same address, Beyond Visible Reality, which explores related territory between dream and waking life. Together the two presentations make the gallery's Zurich space a small survey of the surrealist impulse, historic and contemporary, for the rest of the year.