LUCERNE.- Andreas Brunner (*1988) was awarded the 2025 spot publication prize by the Kommission Bildende Kunst Stadt Luzern. The 22nd edition in the spot on series will be presented at the exhibition opening. Published by Spector Books, entitled Substitute for a Sunset, the edition provides comprehensive insight into Brunner’s work of the past ten years.

The Lucerne artist has created three new work groups for the exhibition, which he arranges in the form of a fragmentary landscape, or rather a vague memory of one. His works explore urban situations and the cycle of growth and decay. Brunner uses alienation as a tool. Scales shift and elements are isolated: miniature architectures, out-size cigarettes or empty advertising signs encounter one another.

Brunner frequently incorporates elements from urban space into his works, in particular guidance systems and signage. By means of a complex process, he sands down the inscriptions on illuminated signs and polishes the acrylic glass, leaving only their technical interior visible. Stripped of their original function, they seem sterile and irritating. On the other hand, the neon tubes become abstract poetic signs. The loss of their original content—the removal of their meaning—facilitates new significances. As a closed, self-referential system, the light circles may indicate idling and endless consumption, or else conjure up associations with the ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail.

Two video works are exhibited as sculptures. Their presentation was inspired by display boards in airports, but instead of flight information these show Brunner’s films. One puzzling moving image turns out, after a certain time, to be a close up of a cigarette tip burning down slowly. Only at the very end, is it evident that what we are seeing is the cigarette brand “Hope” burning down.





The objects from the Compound Fracture series are reminiscent of futuristic architectural designs or ruins, and oscillate between vision and decay, future and past. The objects not only look like relics, they are in fact auxiliary forms from the casting process for an earlier work. Brunner now presents these as ready-mades on special pedestals, thus transforming them into independent sculptures. The artist is interested both in the materiality and mysteriousness of these by-products, and in reinterpreting them as works of art. Brunner transforms found objects and experienced situations in his art. By taking these out of their context and radically abstracting and alienating them, he creates symbols of a fragmented present.

Curated by Eveline Suter

Andreas Brunner. Substitute for a Sunset, with essays by Mia Ćuk, Jóhannes Dagsson, Páll Haukur and Eveline Suter, edited by Stadt Luzern and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Spector Books, g/e, ISBN 978-3-95905-966-4, CHF 30.– / for members KGL CHF 25.–