The retrospective in the Museum of Art Lucerne, featuring about 70 works, provides an overview of the oeuvre of the Swiss artist Aldo Walker (1938-2000). Apart from the early conceptual works, the exhibition includes objects and writing-based works from the seventies, as well as paintings from the last two decades of the artist’s life. Aldo Walker has left behind a coherent body of work, experimental to the last and always concerned with the boundaries of art, and including art-theoretical writings. The relationship between artistic issues and questions of life in the world occupies a major place in his work. For example, Walker examines how systematic art needs to be if it is to be perceived as such. Most of the questions he asks of art are also addressed to the viewer, who is involved in art and its interpretation. He is part of the generation of artists whose beginnings coincide with the emergence of conceptual artistic strategies. Exemplary in this regard is his participation in Harald Szeemann’s 1969 exhibition When attitudes become form in Kunsthalle Bern, and in the exhibition Visualisierte Denkprozesse at the Museum of Art Lucerne the following year. The artist enjoyed his greatest success in the eighties. In 1986 he was invited to the Venice Biennale along with John Armleder, and had his first retrospective at the Kunsthaus in Aarau.

One unique aspect of the retrospective in Lucerne consists of audio, video and performance works which are being realised or performed for the first time by art students and Basel College of Art and Design. The posthumous execution of his performances and the first realisation of some of his projects for television sculptures and sound spaces are based on the artist’s concept of the work. Every artistic proposition, Aldo Walker writes, is bound to the time of its birth. In his case this means the late sixties, a period in which artists called individual authorship into question, and with it the idea that a work of art is produced by the activity of an individual.