ZURICH.- Galerie Peter Kilchmann presents Sessions and Intervals, the third solo exhibition of Paul Mpagi Sepuya at the gallery. Following the artist’s highly successful museum exhibitions at the Fotomuseum Winterthur (28 February to 14 June 2026) and the Sprengel Museum Hannover (1 July to 4 October 2026), the gallery shows new works that offer a concentrated insight into two decades of his practice.

With Sessions and Intervals, Sepuya looks back on the many sessions and cycles of intervals, on the processes, repetitions, and gradual experiments and changes that have shaped the interconnected bodies of work of Dark Room from 2016 to 2025. The museum exhibitions offered a moment of reflection and, at the same time, marked the point at which to begin a new chapter and leave his previous studio behind.

At the center of the exhibition are two new groups of work: the Portfolio series and new collages. Created in close engagement with his extensive archive, the Portfolio series is presented here for the first time. It picks up on the most recent works of the project TRANCE (2024–ongoing) and introduces an interplay between dynamic snapshots and night photography on the one hand and strictly formalized studio photographs on the other. It also includes the latest works from the ten-year cycle in Sepuya’s East Los Angeles studio, which shaped his projects from 2016 to 2026. The selected motifs thus come from different phases of his work and offer a special view of the development of his photographic thinking.

Sepuya explores what it means to file away or archive things, and how sifting and sorting can create room for the unknown, connecting to his earlier unique artist’s book series and previous collages, which likewise emerged from finding meaning through filing away.

In his new collages, Sepuya combines photographs, contact sheets, and archival material. The starting point is surplus laser prints from his working process, which he tears, layers, shifts, and reassembles. These manual interventions produce multilayered analog compositions in which different moments and perspectives meet, making the artistic process visible and bringing together different temporal layers of his practice. The series opens direct access to the sources of Sepuya’s visual world. The collage becomes an independent artistic expression in which materiality, touch, and memory play a central role.

Both groups of work reflect Sepuya’s long-standing engagement with the photographic medium and offer a unique overview of nearly twenty years of artistic practice. They show the archive not as a closed repository, but as a living place of reflection, reordering, and rediscovery.

The exhibition is complemented by early portraits and medium- and large-format photographs that are being shown in the gallery for the first time. The portraits from 2005 to 2011 offer an impressive insight into the development of Sepuya’s visual language: in intimate encounters with friends and companions, he explores the relationship between photographer and sitter, addressing closeness, trust, desire, and identity. What begins as restrained, classical portraiture increasingly becomes an examination of the gaze and the conditions of the photographic image, already anticipating the themes of his later work.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya was born in 1982 in San Bernardino, California. He lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004 and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2016. He is an Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California, San Diego.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya is among the most important voices in contemporary photography. His works question the traditional structures of the portrait and examine the relationships between photographer, models, and viewers. Using mirrors, studio elements, and fragmentation, he develops a visual language that addresses intimacy, closeness, and the mechanisms of seeing. His work revolves around identity, the body, desire, and representation, and has had a lasting influence on the international discussion about photography.

Sepuya has had solo exhibitions at the following international institutions (selection): Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2026); Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2026); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2024); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2022); Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha (2020); Contemporary Arts Museum St. Louis, US (2019); Fotomuseum Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018); KMAC Museum, Louisville, US (2017); and MoCA, Los Angeles, US.His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Barbican Gallery, London, UK (2020); FRAC, Besançon, France (2020); Bass Museum of Art, Miami, US (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Canada (2019); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, US (2019); the Guggenheim Museum, New York, US (2019); Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, UK (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2018); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015).