Within the context of the Manor Art Prize for Central Switzerland in 2011, Patricia Bucher is showing a 30-metre battle panorama based on the traditional pictorial vocabulary of heroic depictions of war. In a phase of her work lasting over three years, the artist has selected through her own research hundreds of battle paintings and representations of war which she first copied, and then digitalised and coloured. Kunstmuseum Luzern is presenting the battle panorama as a freely hanging circular painting.

Patricia Bucher has assembled thousands of warriors from all over the world and from every era, and presents us with an enormous battle-field. In the historical format of a panorama, the artist invites the viewer on a journey through hundreds of battlefields from various cultures and periods: from the first visual depictions of war handed down to us in cave painting, via contemporary wars to the futuristic fiction of video games, from cowboys, Indians, Egyptians, Samurai, Pesians, Incas, Mongols, Zulus, aborigines, Aztecs, the soldiers of the US army and the Swiss themselves – they have all fought in military combat.

In her own (re-)construction the artist investigates the origins of the traditional history of countless wars, as turning-points and climaxes that have impressed themselves within the collective memory and formed our image of history. To what extent does the reception of historical tradition correspond to real events, to what extent is it constructed? Whether fictionally or historically, the battle panorama is a symbol of an endlessly repeated cycle of wars as part of the development of human civilisation.