Ingeborg Lüscher

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Ingeborg Lüscher (2008) in her amber room

Ingeborg Lüscher (born June 22, 1936 in Freiberg , Saxony , as Ingeborg Löffler ) is a German-Swiss actress , painter , photographer , concept, video and installation artist. She has lived and worked in Tegna in the canton of Ticino since 1967 .

Life

Ingeborg Löffler, her maiden name, completed an acting degree in Berlin after graduating from high school and worked in the following years as a theater and film actress. In 1959 she married the Swiss color psychologist Max Lüscher , and in addition to acting, she began studying psychology at the Free University of Berlin . In 1967 Ingeborg Lüscher traveled to India and Czechoslovakia. After separating from Max Lüscher in 1967, she moved to Tegna in Ticino. From this point on she turned to the fine arts as an autodidact . In Locarno she moved into the former studio of Hans Arp . From 1968 onwards she created her first so-called stub pictures , collages of different objects that are covered with cigarettes. In 1969 she discovered the hermit and eccentric Armand Schulthess , who had transformed his house and his large wooded property in Ticino into an encyclopaedic and idiosyncratic collection of all knowledge and documented his work.

In 1972 she took part in the documenta in Kassel for the first time : Her photo documentation about Schulthess was exhibited in the Individual Mythologies section of documenta 5 . It was then that the cohabitation with exhibition organizer Harald Szeemann began , which lasted until his death in 2005. In 1973 she received a Swiss scholarship that enabled her to travel to the USA, Venezuela and Peru. In 1975 their daughter Una Szeemann was born in Locarno.

In 1982 she met another eccentric, the homeless Laurence Pfautz, whose life she documented in a book. In 1984 she was appointed pataphysicist . In the same year she began to explore the materials sulfur and ash as painting material. In 1986 she traveled to the Solfatara near Pozzuoli . On this occasion she exposed stones from the Maggia Valley to sulfur fumes, so that they were coated with yellow. During her trips to Japan a new series of photographs with images of created Omikuji , Shinto - oracle notes . In 1992 she took part in another documenta, documenta IX . In the same year, her works were exhibited at the world exhibition in Seville. In 1993 and 1996 her life's work was shown at retrospectives in Wiesbaden and Aarau. In 1999 and 2001 she took part in the Venice Biennales with one video each and in 2000 at the Locarno Film Festival .

Between 1978 and 2005, in addition to her artistic work, she taught at several academies, such as the School of Design in Lucerne, the École supérieure de l'art visuel in Geneva, the F + F Art School in Zurich and the Summer Academy for Fine Arts in Salzburg , Berlin and Gomera.

Artistic work

Ingeborg Lüscher's artistic work begins with her so-called stump pictures and conceptual works, determined by her biography, on the subjects of eros, love, childhood and death, on dreams and prophecies, which also incorporate her experiences with hypnosis.

Harald Szeemann said in 1992 about her artistic path: "The theatrical, autobiographical, emancipatory, confessing and hedonistic has arrived today in calm, sculptural bodies charged from within and pictorial homages to light."

Stub images

Her first artistic objects included inboxes , boxes with visualized mathematical rows that were stacked on top of one another and whose surfaces or edges she changed through the action of fire.

In the following phase, she uses objects that have already changed their shape through exposure to fire, the stubs of cigarettes or cigars. She pours them in abundance on window sills, sticks them in order or in heaps on cardboard boxes, bicycles, chairs, on everyday objects of all kinds as well as on sheets with résumés or police reports, and in this way alienates them for the viewer's perception.

Photo documentation

From 1969 Lüscher worked on a photo documentation about the Swiss hermit and eccentric Armand Schulthess . Schulthess lived in his 18,000 m² chestnut forest in the Onsernone Valley in Ticino, where he ran his idiosyncratic project of an all-encompassing collection of knowledge - an encyclopedia in the forest. Lüscher noted her conversations with Schulthess and photographed him and his incredibly diverse objects with bits of knowledge that he had nailed to trees on metal tablets and hung and mounted on slats. After his death, Schulthess' life's work was completely destroyed by his uncomprehending heirs in an autodafé campaign lasting 3 days. Lüscher's book Documentation on AS - The Biggest Bird Can't Fly is one of the few testimonies to this unusual life .

In 1982 she documented the life of another social outsider and homeless in a similar way in the book The Outrageous Tourist Laurence Pfautz , using his own texts.

Wizard photos

In 1976, the series of magic photos began , in which she has now photographed over 500 people: guests of the house, artist colleagues, neighbors or relatives, who were all asked to conjure up whatever comes to mind at that moment. In a session, the location of which is determined by the person to be photographed, 18 pictures are taken, 9 of which are selected for a picture sequence. The resulting images are surprisingly direct, because the person photographed only has his own imagination available.

Sulfur and ash

She has been using organic materials in her work since 1981. Various series of volcano pictures , material pictures made of sand, earth, pigments, wood glue, plaster and the like on cardboard are created. In 1984 she began to deal with the element sulfur, whose color intensity and luminosity fascinated her.

Sulfur and the color yellow become dominant elements of Lüscher's sculptural and painterly work. Yellow is combined with an intense black that Lüscher gains from ash and acrylic .

After she had exposed stones to the natural sulfur fumes in the solfatara in one of her first works , she subsequently covered various objects with sulfur powder herself and turned them into light bodies. From 1990 onwards, strictly geometrically shaped blocks in yellow and black, in large formats and combined in different ways, were created. In painting, too, the most varied of possibilities for the interplay of yellow and black are tried out, from all gradations of yellow and black overlaying and overpainting, from cloud-like structures to pure color field painting. Since she works with sulfur blossoms, there are never any new color values ​​even when mixed, yellow and black are always retained - separated from one another.

With sulfur and ashes, Lüscher achieves the greatest possible contrast between yellow as the color of light and black as a sign of its complete absence.

fusion

At the 2001 Venice Biennale , Ingeborg Lüscher showed her football video Fusion for the first time , which received a great response from the press. Players from Grasshoppers Zurich and FC St. Gallen play against each other, dressed in bespoke Italian suits, business shirts, ties and football boots. The referee is the Swiss Urs Meier , the game is moderated in the German version by Beni Thurnheer , in the Italian version by a spokesman for RAI .

During the game, in which all possible tricks and fouls are used more or less successfully, new strategies are constantly discussed and changing coalitions are formed. If the ball hits the net, it can turn out to be a bulging suitcase, a cell phone or another prop of the business world. The game ends with an own goal and the two teams merge. The commentator, on behalf of the viewer, remains uncertain about the outcome of the game: one person has won, but who?

Lüscher says about her film: “A soccer game should become a parable for the managerial caste who handle mergers in banks and industry. Footballers and managers apparently behave in a similar way: They need hard training, willingness to take risks, the will to win, tactics, the ability to foul, to do tricks, but also to be imaginative.

Books

  • Ingeborg Lüscher: Documentation about AS The largest bird cannot fly. Photos by Ingeborg Lüscher. Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, cop. 1972. ISBN 3-7701-0651-2
  • Ingeborg Lüscher (editor): Experienced and thumbed things are assigned to one another. Oumansky Prize, Fantonigrafica, Venezia 1975
  • Ingeborg Lüscher: Icarus' fear or legumes are butterflies. Work with 13 overpainted Polaroid photos a. Texts; Aarau; Frankfurt am Main; Salzburg; Sauerländer 1982. ISBN 3-7941-2275-5
  • Ingeborg Lüscher: AVANT - APRES / Sheer Prophecy - True Dreams , (Ed.) Center d'art contemporain , Geneva 1980
  • Ingeborg Lüscher (curator of issue No. 21 of Studio magazine, October 1983): Every winter has its brightest day. Photos and texts; together with contributions by Francesco Clemente , Bernhard Johannes Blume , Ulrike Rosenbach , Michael Buthe , Jörg Immendorff and James Lee Byars
  • Ingeborg Lüscher: The unheard of tourist - Laurence Pfautz. Aarau; Frankfurt am Main; Salzburg; Sauerländer 1985. ISBN 3-7941-2712-9 (only available from the Libri & Arte bookstore in Locarno- Muralto )
  • Ingeborg Lüscher (pictures) and Adolf Muschg (text): Japanese lucky notes. Suhrkamp Insel Verlag 1996. ISBN 3-458-16814-1

Works

(Selection)

  • Inboxes , 1967-1968
  • Stummelbilder , working with cigarette butts, 1969–1972.
  • Wizard photos . Work in progress. Photo series from 1976.
  • The biggest bird cannot fly . Documentation of the encyclopedia in the forest by Armand Schulthess . Documentation began in 1969. Exhibited at documenta 5 in Kassel
  • Volcano series , collages made from earth, ashes, wood dust, coal, acrylic, on cardboard or cotton canvas, from 1985 to 1987.
  • Gli tatting della solfatara . Sulphurized stones, 1986, Castello Svevo , Bari (Italy)
  • So that you can walk through Venice and nobody recognizes you - magic hat for a wanted man . Sculpture made from the bark of date palms and jute, 1998
  • Lumen est omen . Installation in the Johanneskirche in Feldkirch , 2000
  • Fei-Ya! Fei-Ya! fly, fly, (Our Chinese Friends) , 1999, 41st Venice Biennale, video 8 min.
  • Merger . 2001, 42nd Venice Biennale, video 13.40 min.
  • The Amber Room . Installation. Swarovski Kristallwelten , Wattens, Tyrol, 2003
  • The hanging gardens of the Semiramis , installation, Rovereto 2003 - Wiesbaden 2006 - Berlin 2008

literature

  • Ingeborg Lüscher . Sculptures. Exhibition catalog. Farideh Cadot Gallery, Heike Curtze Gallery, Elisabeth Kaufmann Gallery, Krinzinger Gallery. Roetherdruck, Darmstadt 1998.
  • Ingeborg Lüscher . Exhibition catalog Museum Wiesbaden . March 28 - July 25, 1993. Ed. Volker Rattemeyer . Wiesbaden 1993. ISBN 3-89258-022-7
  • MANUAL. A reference work for every work by Ingeborg Lüscher, Samuel Herzog (text), Niggli Verlag 1999. ISBN 3-7212-0354-2
  • Viveri polifonici. Exhibition catalog for Ingeborg Lüscher, Museum Mart , Rovereto, Verlag Skira, 2004
  • Leave a sprig of white lilac in South Africa. Exhibition catalog on Ingeborg Lüscher, Museum Wiesbaden, May 14 - July 23, 2006. Wiesbaden 2006. ISBN 3-89258-066-9

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lüscher, Ingeborg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Löffler, Ingeborg (maiden name); Lüscher-Löffler, Ingeborg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German filmmaker, photographer, concept, video and installation artist
DATE OF BIRTH June 22, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Freiberg , Saxony , Germany