Maurice Haas’ Portraits of Cinema’s Icons Find Home at Paradeplatz
Six large scale photographs by the renowned Swiss photographer Maurice Haas transform the halls of the Mandarin Oriental Savoy into an intimate gallery. Each portrait is available to acquire.
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The Mandarin Oriental Savoy, Zurich presents ‘We Remain Strangers’, an exhibition of six photographs by Swiss photographer Maurice Haas, displayed throughout the hotel’s entrance and corridors. One singular piece emerged during the Zurich Film Festival 2025: a portrait of Scottish actor and director James McAvoy, draped in an opulent carpet on the hotel’s staircase. The image hints at Haas’ broader artistic practice, in which he photographs recognisable figures wreathed in sumptuous textiles.
Haas, numbered among Switzerland’s most respected portrait photographers, constructs something more elusive than conventional celebrity documentation. The subjects possess a presence he describes as engaging, expressive and commanding. Yet the title itself, We Remain Strangers, acknowledges the paradox at the exhibition’s heart: that even in proximity, even captured at scale, certain distances persist between observer and observed. The exhibition opens precisely before this year’s Zurich Film Festival, a temporal synchronicity that anchors cinema’s luminaries within Zurich’s cultural geography.
All works are available for purchase in both the scale displayed and in smaller formats. The exhibition runs until the end of December. The Mandarin Oriental Savoy occupies Paradeplatz, at 12 Poststrasse.
Imagery courtesy of Mandarin Oriental Savoy, Zurich (@mo_savoyzurich).
