Kunstmuseum Luzern is organising the most comprehensive presentation so far of the artistic work of Urs Lüthi, born in Kriens in 1947. The exhibition encompasses not only the most important individual works such as the photographic self-portraits and the various work-groups brought together by Lüthi in ‘Orders’, but also displays the early work from the mid-1960s. Lüthi has directly integrated himself and his biography in his work, in a powerfully visual way. In retrospect his fascination with the diversity of media and his artistic determination to create works with an almost classical effect in a range of genres becomes apparent. He returns repeatedly to individual themes and aspects, combines them in new arrangements and extends them through new picture Solutions.

Today we recognise Urs Lüthi as the great aesthete who always connects his pictorial statements, however lofty or ironic they might seem, with an enthusiasm for artistic skill. Lüthi is also a gifted draughtsman, print-maker, painter and sculpture, as well as a story-teller and stager of big stories and small emotions. This dialectic of form and content, which leads the viewer to an experience both aesthetic and intellectual, marks his entire oeuvre.

The exhibition concept was developed in close collaboration with the artist. This fact is also intended to express the fundamental importance held by exhibition design within the artist’s work. As early as 1966 Lüthi worked in an installational sense, staging his art in terms of a dialectical shaping of experience. The Lucerne exhibition does not follow a chronology, but stresses the major thematic lines of Luethis oeuvre.