Anton Egloff (b. 1933 Wettingen, Switzerland, lives and works in Lucerne) is exhibiting several new works from the past six years in four rooms of the Museum of Art Lucerne under the title subsculpture. Strikingly, the majority of the works use lightweight, plain materials such as cardboard, rubber and wood. Their poetry is muted and their language reduced. Moreover, the space around and between Egloff’s sculpturospatial groupings has opened up progressively in recent years. As we move around investigating these pedestal-less sculptures, they give rise in perception to a constant flow of different views.

Anton Egloff has been a leading figure on the Central Swiss art scene since the 1960s, and received the City of Lucerne Art Prize in 1984. Many well-known artists have benefited from his instruction at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, where he taught from 1964–1995, becoming Head of the Art Department in 1990. Parallel to this he has never left off working on his own art, which has intensified in recent years. This is the focus of the exhibition subsculpture at the Museum of Art Lucerne.

Anton Egloff’s contribution to our grasp of sculptural, space- and site-related installations since the late 1960s has been considerable, as he has absorbed and transmitted new currents in his work. His sculptures typically stand, lie or hang in their exhibition space, pedestal-less and approachable in surrounding space. His “sculpturospatial” works in the MoAL exhibition are arranged in thought-provoking constellations with respect to each other and to their circumjacent space. As one walks around the works – e.g. Pas (2000/2002) or heim … (1999/2001) – the space between them is activated: it starts to move, becoming an integral part of the work. In the process, each new standpoint and angle provokes new views. Signs and interspaces set up their own specific rhythm, which takes on aspects of a code that one tries to decipher as one walks around. Words like «Heim» (home/house), «Heimat» (home/homeland), «Heimatstadt» (home town) – selected with forethought and written out – function as complex bearers of meaning and send the viewer/reader down branching corridors of thought. Hören Ost Süd West Nord (Hear East South West North) appears in the exhibition for the first time.

Anton Egloff has never been an artist of opulence or profusion. In recent years his anyway soberly stringent œuvre has undergone yet further reduction. The result – frugal clarity and plainness – has not robbed his works of their own characteristically light magic.