Pilzfigur mit Kugelsockel

Material

Iron

Dating

1994

About the artist

Bernhard Luginbühl had a soft spot for animals and for the machine aesthetics of the industrial age. He welded together his often bulky sculptures and fantasy creatures from iron, steel and scrap metal. The sheer size and raw poetry of these works made him one of the most popular sculptors in Switzerland since the 1960s. In addition to a sculptural oeuvre comprising some 1500 sculptures, he created an extensive body of graphic art.

Luginbühl’s first works were created in the late 1940s during his sculpture apprenticeship, which the Bernese-born artist prematurely abandoned to work as a freelance artist. From the mid-1950s, he switched from wood and stone to scrap iron as his preferred material. His eye trained on the works of abstract sculptors such as Alexander Calder or Eduardo Chillida, he developed a formal language that breathed the elemental force of the material, aggressive and delicate at the same time, powerful and inert, organic and technoid. A fine example of this is Luginbühl’s Winged Mother figure from 1986 in the Mobiliar collection. What appears from a distance to be a gigantic indoor deep pump turns out, on closer inspection, to be a composition weighing several tonnes and of almost dancing lightness, equipped with the typical elephant-ear-like attachment of his wing-mother sculptures. In addition to this expansive work and the smaller elephant sculpture Nimrod III (1992), the furnishings include several copperplate engravings – among them the early print Weiser Mann und Punch (Wise Man and Punch), which was created in 1969 at the same time as the large sculpture Osaka Punch Japan and exemplifies how Luginbühl initially used two-dimensional prints to reflect his sculptural work before this connection gradually dissolved and the prints were increasingly created independently of his sculptural work. The line structures of prints I (1992), III (1993), IV (1993) and VI (1996), for example, as well as the proliferation of ribbons, spirals, cogwheels and saw blades in the serigraph Fanal (1993), develop their own pull into the fantastic.

Bernhard Luginbühl, who lived and worked in Mötschwil in the Emmental from 1966, always understood art as a social practice and insisted on its proximity to real life – whether in happenings on the village square or on the international stages of the 1972 Venice Biennale or documenta 7 in 1982, in which he participated.

Bernhard Luginbühl was born in Bern (CHE) in 1929 and died in Langnau im Emmental (CHE) in 2011.