Lukas Ulmi

Lukas Ulmi - Re-flexions IV

Technique: Rusty iron rod

Artist Biography: Lukas Ulmi is a Swiss artist born in 1958 in Luzern. He graduated from the Luzern School of Art and Design and completed his training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. He currently lives and works in Zurich.Ulmi's work focuses on the interaction between nature and culture, and how these two elements relate to each other. His work spans a wide range of media, including sculpture, installation, drawing and photography. He often uses natural and organic materials such as wood, earth, stones and plants in his works, combining them with artificial and synthetic elements.Ulmi has exhibited his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the United States, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel. In 2002, he received the Swiss art prize Kiefer Hablitzel.In addition to his artistic practice, Ulmi is also a professor of art and design at the Luzern School of Art and Design, where he has taught since 1990. He has been recognized for his commitment to art education and was awarded the prize for the best art and design teacher in Switzerland in 2015.

 

Lukas Ulmi delves into a reflection on the cube that, citing one of the analytical keys of Julio Gonzalez's iron sculpture, is drawn in space. To be more specific: the cube is established as a blurred possibility traced with thin iron rods that appears only at one point or becomes reality only as a shadow drawn on the wall. This game that was the basis of the series "Laberintos Visuales" and that already wielded the square as a central motif, is now redoubled in these new sculptures where the participation of the spectator, the kinetic and the visual and luminous effect - all characteristic of Ulmi's career - are even more defining. The importance of form for the sculptor is related to its behavior in space, in a dialogue that tries to force the composite vision of our gaze to force us to look for -to fix- a specific point of view from which all the lines of an apparently impossible figure that moves away from its quadrangular origins are ordered until they build the edges of one or several combined cubes. Thus, the viewer must grope each sculpture until he finds the figure, which is always different in each composition.