Giving expression to the oppressive, the disconcerting, the actually alien corresponds to a primal human need, more than ever in our fragmenting age. Since the mid-1990s the painter Stefan à Wengen, 1964 born in Basle and now based in Düsseldorf, has been investigating issues around cultural codes in large groups of works. He draws on the western tradition of painting, seeks references to other cultures and creates a highly symbolic painting of a new reality. At the core of his artistic work is the uncanny, which has a long tradition in the history of art. From the formal point of view his atmospherically charged paintings are based on the media of film and documentary photography. The old pictorial genre of the portrait, always unsettling in à Wengen’s work, also occupies an important place. The artist’s Ghost portraits, and also the animal portraits, prove to be icons of evil, menace and the uncanny.

Kunstmuseum Luzern is organising the first institutional solo show by Stefan à Wengen, and would like to give his work the appropriate resonance with this platform and the actual publication, which have been included within the sponsorship programme ‘Binding Sélection d’artistes’, of the Sophie und Karl Binding-Stiftung. His paintings are held in significant public and private collections in Germany, Spain, the USA, Switzerland and the Netherlands, many of which have contributed to this project.