LUCERNE.- German-speaking Switzerland’s oldest art academy is celebrating its anniversary in 2017. Over the past 140 years, the academy Hochschule Luzern – Design & Kunst (HSLU D&K), albeit under varying names, has produced countless sculptors, drawing teachers, illustrators, textile designers and fine artists. With the three-part exhibition series Fortsetzung folgt (To be continued), the Kunstmuseum Luzern and the akku Kunstplattform are focussing on the question of what has become of those former students. On show are current works by about 20 artists between the ages of 30 and 84.

For Part 2 of Fortsetzung folgt, Barbara Davi is mounting a solo exhibition for which she has made a whole series of new works. Four large sculptures made of bent sheets of aluminium respond to the exhibition space, the window and the room height, taking up formal and technical aspects of the artist’s collages and photographs. This includes positive-negative forms as well as a play with light and shade or proportions. The aluminium sculptures are reminiscent of outsize pieces of folded paper so that visitors move about as if through one of Davi’s collages.

Barbara Davi deliberately uses not only space but also light in her works. She includes the windows of the exhibition rooms in her installations, employs reflecting surfaces or playfully imitates light effects. Davi’s precise interventions enter into a subtle dialogue with the surroundings, questioning them and pointing to architectonic and atmospheric features. For Train of Thought, Barbara Davi has created not only the aluminium sculptures, but also collages and photographs that engage with the rooms of the Kunstmuseum Luzern, both the current ones and those in the former building by Armin Meili.

Barbara Davi creates poetic spatial constructs, alters perspective and shows us that we are surrounded by the new. Be it real or imaginary, sketched or constructed space, the artist enables us to walk through it in our thoughts and follow that ‘train of thought’ around corners. For this purpose, she uses the basic elements of sculptural work – space, void and light – irrespective of the medium she chooses. Scheidegger & Spiess will publish Barbara Davi’s first comprehensive monograph to mark the exhibition opening.

As at each opening in this exhibition series, there will be a performance: on 20.10. Brigitte Dätwyler will step up to the rostrum. In her performances Dätwyler often works with minor shifts in everyday moments and situations that baffle us and give us cause to reflect. We are looking forward very much to her lecture!

To complete the exhibition series there will be a group exhibition (opening on 08.12.2017) with works by Anton Egloff, Filib Schürmann and Katharina Anna Wieser and a performance by Christoph Rütimann.