There’s a new rhythm to winter in the Alps: mornings on the mountain, afternoons drifting through galleries where the landscapes you just skied reappear on the walls. From St Moritz to Gstaad, Verbier and Aspen, this season’s most compelling alpine experience is as much about art as it is about snow.

St Moritz
St Moritz has long been the cultural capital of the Alps and this season it has a true headline show. Hauser & Wirth presents Alberto Giacometti. Faces and Landscapes of Home from 13 December 2025. Curated by Tobia Bezzola, the exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures and drawings focused on Giacometti’s family and on the landscapes of Val Bregaglia and the Engadin, shown alongside photographs by Ernst Scheidegger.

Just a fifteen-minute walk from the city centre brings you to the Segantini Museum, one of the area’s more overlooked treasures. Housed in a striking domed building, the museum is dedicated to Giovanni Segantini, a leading nineteenth-century painter who lived and worked in the region. Known for carrying his canvases and materials high into the mountains, he painted directly from the Alpine landscape around him.

Designed by St. Moritz architect Nicolaus Hartmann specifically to house Segantini’s work, the museum showcases many of his most significant paintings, including the powerful unfinished triptych Life, Nature, Death. His distinctive use of divisionism gives the Alpine scenes an extraordinary luminosity that is best appreciated in person. This season’s special exhibition is devoted to his still lifes, rarely seen works that are usually kept out of public view.

The Kitchen Maid, c17th century, in the manner of Jacob Ochtervelt, hangs in one of the rooms at Chesa Marchetta © Joël Hunn.

Gstaad
Gstaad has quietly become one of the most gallery-dense ski villages in Europe. Just a short drive from the centre, Tarmak22 sits inside Gstaad Saanen Airport and is known for its ambitious seasonal shows. It’s art that greets you the moment you land and a brilliant way to fill a delay or a leisurely pre-flight wait.

In the village, Gagosian Gstaad continues its winter programme in the former Posthotel. It is worth dropping in even if you know nothing about the current show. The scale is intimate, the work is serious and the crowd tends to mix collectors with people who have simply stepped off the slopes for a look.

Just along the promenade, Almine Rech adds further weight to the scene with its chalet style space. This winter it presents Zio Zegler: Six Trees from 22 December 2025. The California based painter is known for distilling and rebuilding forms into a personal vocabulary of symbols, figures and totemic shapes. Here, works built around the recurring motif of the tree grow from meditative drawings into dense, textured paintings in oil, sand, soil and pigment. Drop in between runs for a concise, high-energy stop.

Looking ahead in the season, MAZE Art Gstaad returns to the Festival tent in the centre of the village from 19 to 22 February 2026. The boutique winter salon brings a curated group of international galleries across modern and contemporary art, design and high jewellery, and offers a compact alternative to the big city fair circuit, with the added advantage that you can ski between visits.

Gagosian Gstaad. Photography: Annik Wetter, Courtesy Gagosian.

Verbier
Verbier’s art scene is smaller but unusually well placed in the landscape. The Verbier 3 D Foundation Sculpture Park is the main draw, a three kilometre route that starts at the Ruinettes lift and winds along the mountain with works installed directly in the snow and rock. The sculptures change over time but currently on view is Sempervivum, a new site specific work by Cannupa Hanska Luger, created during the Foundation’s 2025 residency. The piece takes its name from the hardy alpine plant once believed to protect homes from lightning and misfortune. Luger builds this idea of resilience into the sculpture itself, using local stone set in a spiral pattern drawn from the plant’s natural geometry and pairing it with a steel form that echoes a lightning bolt.

Back in the village, Bel Air Fine Art shows a mix of high profile names and is an easy stop on Place Centrale as you walk through central Verbier. A short distance away, AIFA Gallery focuses on Japanese contemporary work with a compact, pointed programme from its space on Rue de la Poste. Currently on view is Susumu Takashima: The Evolution of the Line, a solo exhibition that looks at how different tools shape the marks they make. Ink lines fade as the brush dries, pencil lines thicken as the point wears down and metalpoint creates a steady, delicate trace. The drawings are built from the behaviour of the materials rather than imagery, and the result is a straightforward, focused look at drawing as a process of repetition, variation and time.

If you are willing to leave the resort for a day or half day, drive about thirty minutes down the valley to Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny. From 12 December 2025 the foundation presents De Manet à Kelly. L’art de l’empreinte, a major printmaking exhibition drawn from the collections of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris. The show sits alongside Gianadda’s permanent collection and sculpture garden, making it a strong cultural counterpoint to Verbier’s outdoor art.

No. 1387 Fence by Rana Begum (2024) at The Verbier 3 D Foundation.

Aspen
This season, the must see stop is the Aspen Art Museum’s exhibition Break It Down by Glenn Ligon, a Black, gay artist based in New York and renowned for his intellectually rigorous, conceptual work. On view through March 15, 2026, the show brings together three pivotal series from the 1990s and early 2000s: Figure, Runaways and Narratives. Across text led pieces, printmaking, painting and photography, Ligon examines race, identity and sexual politics in the American context. Admission is free, so your après ski budget can be reserved for a well-mixed cocktail after your gallery visit.

Just round the corner, Galerie Maximillian caters to a wide range of collectors, with works spanning from the 19th century through to today and includes museum-quality pieces by Magritte, Anatsui and Michael Craig Martin. The gallery is known for its warm, personal approach and a loyal base of clients who return yearly to see its latest display. Its founder often notes that he only exhibits pieces he would display in his own home, a philosophy that gives the space an intimate and carefully curated feel.

Five minutes away, Baldwin Gallery (until 21 December) presents a new exhibition of works by New York based artist Marilyn Minter, marking the gallery’s fifth show with the celebrated photographer and painter. Her compositions examine the commodification of the female body while simultaneously exploring the charged aesthetics of fashion photography. Recently, Cultivist members sat down for coffee with Marilyn for a morning of conversation in Los Angeles, hearing her speak directly about this latest body of work.

For the more adventurous, head to Snowmass Mountain, easily reached via the Aspen Snowmass shuttle or a short drive. In addition to offering excellent skiing trails, Aspen’s sister mountain is home to Anderson Ranch Arts Center: a nonprofit arts organisation where you can tour the campus, eat lunch with artists and students, and peek into studios and exhibition spaces dotted throughout the ranch.

Until 19 December, don’t miss Joel Mesler’s free public lecture series, a rare chance to hear directly from one of our longtime favourite artists!. His work brings universal themes to life through autobiography, humour, and self deprecation, with bold, surprising compositional twists. Drawing on childhood memories, he reflects on design and popular iconography, as well as the fluid, ever shifting nature of painting.

Marilyn Minter, Swiped, 2024. Dye sublimation print, 30 × 40 inches. Photo: courtesy of Baldwin Gallery.