The week before Kilian Rüthemann’s new exhibition opened at RaebervonStenglin in Zürich, a band of the great, good, wealthy, and hangers-on were in the luxurious Swiss mountain village of Gstaad for the launch of “Elevation 1049: Between Heaven and Hell,” an exhibition of works “positioned in and defined by the landscape they inhabit” that also runs until March 8th. Rüthemann’s contribution to the project is Acht Säulen für den Winter [Eight Columns for Winter] (2014), a row of eight palm tree trunks, upended and planted in the snow-covered lawn of the—indeed grand— hotel Le Grand Bellevue. Back in Zürich, some three hours away, his solo show, “hatch up your troubles,” begins in a similar vein with One For Every Moment (Stack) (all works 2014), a rough, hairy column, which at four meters tall is just short of the ceiling in the gallery’s first room. Materially connected to the tree trunks shown in Gstaad, the column is made from a stack of coconut-fiber circular mats with rubber bases. Even though the work towers high, its layers look more like a sediment core drawn from the earth than a palm tree. The second work, hatch up your troubles, borrows its title from a …

Much discussion of performance or Land Art from the 1960s and 70s considers whether the art consists of the work itself or its documentation. Could it really be experienced secondhand? Was the art the idea … or the stuff of it? Such recondite questions had to be put in the closet when it came to making saleable works in order to live, and few artists of note have ever proven themselves capable of true disinterest in the career element of being an artist. In 1974, the artist Robert Kinmont walked away from a successful practice to support his family by other means, first of all by founding a school of sorts, then devoting time to the study of meditation, and later working as a carpenter. His return to making art was not for three decades, but, despite that lacuna, his work has rapidly re-found an audience. It’s the first time his art has been seen in Europe, and at that, in three shows: here in Switzerland at RaebervonStenglin; though an exhibition at the Fundación La Caixa in Barcelona, which will travel to Madrid hot on its heels; and the LA MOCA exhibition “Ends of the Earth: Art of the Land to …

An austere, Mars-meets-Minimalism environment greets visitors to “Pressure Drop,” Sofia Hultén’s recent exhibition at RaebervonStenglin. Strewn over the gallery floor are large, glittery rocks that conjure both a meteor shower come to inexplicable rest, and the boulder-bedeviled construction sites just outside the door (the gallery is in an industrial area of Zürich undergoing seismic demolition). Among the rocks stands a tall, rusty screw press, its circular silver halo evoking the rings of Saturn. Across the gallery, attenuated pieces of wood, pocked with nails and paint, lean against a wall like some fervent reductionist’s idea of a forest. If the installation has a sober, Process Art look to it, the works themselves take that idea to its most sterling and ridiculous. The rocks? Hultén made latex moulds of rocks she found at a construction site, then pulverized and recast them in their found forms in the moulds, giving them their pokerfaced title: Artificial Conglomerates (2011). The wood? Found room molding, which the artist meticulously copied, before mixing the original and manufactured pieces together against the wall. By comparison, the stoic screw press was barely touched: Hultén simply inserted a rusty steel bar into the press, allowing it to put five tons …