Ingeborg Lüscher. 300 Million Years

Ingeborg Lüscher
„300 Million Years“
6.9.-1.10.2014

You are warmly invited to Ingeborg Lüscher's first solo show at Campagne Première. After her contribution of historical works from the 1970s to the group exhibition "Transformations – Ingeborg Lüscher, Ana Mendieta, Teresa Murak" in the spring, with "300 Million Years" she will now introduce a new photo series. Since the start of her artistic practice in the late 1960s, Ingeborg Lüscherʼs work has been revolving around everyday objects, experiences and impressions from her immediate environment. Besides objects and installations, this has also yielded photography, paintings, texts and – since the 1990s – video art. The artist frequently produces serial work. Although her oeuvre is rooted in conceptual art, she has also satirized the underlying governing principles of strictness and order. She juxtaposes the dispersion of a motif or idea in a series with forms that are influenced by autobiographical factors. The personal and specific, which are frequently interwoven with the artistʼs memories and stories, build a stark contrast with the unspecific, repetitive and serial nature of her work. Since 2011, Ingeborg Lüscher has produced a large volume of analog photographs in and around her hometown in the Tessin region, Switzerland. She has taken these works through an extensive process of selection and modification. With this procedure, the artist has made her motifs – images of lichens on stones – blurred and imprecise. Lüscher may have chosen photography as the principal medium for her current work, but she has broken one of its main rules: the sharpness of representation. Through the selection of a segment of the photo and subsequent enlargement of the print, the lichens enlace into a picturesquely hazy, organic whir. The motifsʼ lack of sharpness befits the equally unspecified pictorial space. The decision to modify the photographs in this manner, combined with the exhibition title, underscores the idea that the oldest organic microstructures also reflect macrocosmic reality. Ingeborg Lüscher relates her images of lichens to questions and observations of a scientific as well as of a metaphysical nature. Spirituality and irrationality are fundamental components in Lüscherʼs work. She ascribes her images of lichens to a statement by Werner Heisenberg, which deals with the ambivalence of the natural sciences, as well as the impossibility to separate them from metaphysics. By addressing metaphysics, the artist colonises those territories that lie beyond objectivity, where she actively practices her workʼs inherent irrationality. The exhibition "300 Million Years" presents her most recent photographs alongside the 2003 video work "Frozen River - who killed Jerusalem". This work, with its insurgent soundtrack of the great outdoors, also reveals how an inconspicuous recording of Nature can be charged with meaning. Ingeborg Lüscher (1936, Freiberg, Saxony) has been a part of numerous national and international exhibitions ever since her participation in the 1968 Grosse Kunstausstellung at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Large solo exhibitions of her work were held at, amongst others, the Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, Museum Wiesbaden, MaRT Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rovereto, NCCA National Center of Contemporary Art in Moscow and at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz. Her work was presented at Documenta 5 and IX as well as during the Venice Biennale of 1980 and 1990. In 2011, Ingeborg Lüscher was awarded the Meret Oppenheim Prize. Her most recent solo exhibitions took place at Kunstmuseum Luzern (2010), ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (2011), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2012) and Situation Kunst (for Max Imdahl) Ruhr University, Bochum (2013). An extensive retrospective exhibition is planned at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn for 2016.