The group exhibition inaugurating Maria Bernheim’s new gallery represents, according to its introductory text, “simply a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new.” The space’s spotless, Chelsea-esque features—sanded concrete floors and the requisite glass storefront—certainly make for a no-nonsense stage on which to appraise the goods on offer according to these self-imposed, stringent, and subjective criteria. The gallery’s text deploys lengthy passages from Clement Greenberg’s seminal if awkwardly haute-socialist 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” which, for an enterprise such as Bernheim’s, takes guts. Planted in a prime location right across from the city’s artistic hub, the Löwenbräu Areal—where Zurich’s chief contemporary art institutions reside in frictionless symbiosis with blue chips like Hauser & Wirth and Galerie Eva Presenhuber—Bernheim foregoes the vaunted if too often self-conscious and commercialized coming-of-age narrative of the gritty downtown space which evolves into a market force. Despite this Swiss-style “umbilical cord of gold,” the grouping of artists on view does retain a basis in the local, pairing emerging talents such as Mitchell Anderson and Ramaya Tegegne with more internationally established artists like Jon Rafman. The former are presences on the local scene who also run some of the most interesting off-spaces in Switzerland—Plymouth Rock in …