LUCERNE.- For anyone who is not quite in the know, the huge sculptures and abstract reliefs by Hans Josephsohn do not necessarily represent recumbent figures. Yet the titles of the groups of works clearly point to the human form. For more, impressions of the artist’s fingers can still be made out in the bronze casts of his works. The human figure has also been inscribed into Katinka Bock’s objects, for example, through the length of the limbs, the span of the arms or the upright positions. Fabian Marti’s huge photograms, videos and objects connote a purely aesthetic delight in form, although it is evident that traces and imprints of his fingers and hands play a central role. What is common to all three positions, over generations and irrespective of the medium, are the haptic quality, the earnestness and the human scale. The exhibition title quotes a short story by Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who captures the absurdities of human life in a sober idiom.

Hans Josephsohn’s repertoire starts with the classical sculptural canon which he re-interpreted constantly and further developed for his purposes. In doing so he concentrated on the human figure, presenting it as a head, a bust and a half-length figure, lying, standing or as a relief with multiple interrelated figures. Although in his half-length works the almost amorphous shapes with their scarred and chapped surface scarcely evoke anything figurative anymore, Hans Josephsohn always proceeded from the image, the apprehension of human bodies and their spatial relations.

Katinka Bock’s Tomorrow’s Sculpture marks the start of the show. Exhibited in a sculpture park in the south of France, it is normally exposed to wind and weather. Bock focuses intensely on the city, the landscape and all those who live and move in such spaces. Is it a figure, an arch, a frame or a colonnade? An important feature of all Katinka Bock’s exhibitions is the inclusion of the local, her work with the givens of the respective exhibition venue. One clay ball of the work Seechamäleon was stored at the bottom of the Lake of Lucerne since the beginning of the year 2015 and defied seasons, wind, weather, waves and efflorescence, and Bock uses an abandoned ship’s mast from the Lucerne wharf in the work Pythagoras.

While the exhibitions were being installed Fabian Marti set up a spacious studio at the Kunstmuseum Luzern. The room gave him ample space to process, expose, develop, dry and mount the photograms. The origin of a big wall painting was an artistic action in Los Angeles shortly before Marti travelled to Lucerne: in his studio he drafted an octopus in a few minutes time onto his left arm-bed and had it immediately tattooed. In the exhibition the octopus-drawing, the artist’s spirit animal, is enlarged to the extreme.

Curated by Fanni Fetzer