Lake Lucerne is seen as the heart and cradle of Switzerland. Since time immemorial it has shaped the life and identity of the people who live on its shores. The Museum of Art Lucerne’s major summer exhibition casts a bright light on the vast deluge of images of this stretch of water, to become an exhibition both about the essence of the lake and about the essence of images.

Avoiding linear chronology, art-works and pictorial documents from the mid-18th century to the present day have been brought together, including a cabinet of hitherto unpublished watercolours by William Turner, which he painted on one of his trips to Lucerne, a room of the monumental, heroic tableaux of Lake Uri (part of Lake Lucerne) by the famous Geneva landscape painter Alexandre Calame, and selected paintings by artists from Lovis Corinth to Gerhard Richter.

The exhibition also includes a wide variety of artistic, photographic and filmic documentation of life above and below the water table, along with special events around the lake, such as King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s enthusiasm for Schiller’s saga of William Tell in images from a film by Donatello and Fosco Dubini, or television presenter Kurt Felix’s candid-camera Nessie staging for a 1976 episode of the series Teleboy on Swiss Television. Various contemporary artists have created works specially for the exhibition, including the musician Cyrill Schläpfer with an extraordinary haul of sounds from Lake Lucerne that he processes into a symphonic composition, the artist Margaretha Dubach with a performative sculpture, or Peter Regli setting up a live-cam on his artificial island in the Reuss delta of Lake Uri.

For the exhibition Elke Krystufek has painted a large self portrait embedded in the postcard panorama of Lucerne und Cécile Wick has realised a new series of photographs. The Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology as well as the Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry of ETH Zurich provide exciting scientific images of Lake Lucerne, while documentary and historically interesting pictures by various photographers, like the well known Nidwalden Police photographer Arnold Odermatt for example, will be presented.

The exhibition Paintings of Lake Lucerne promises a feast for the eye and nourishment for the soul. A surprising tour of discovery through «le plus beau pays du monde» (as Calame called the region), a ramble through history and a plunge into the world of images.