Lukas Ulmi

Lukas Ulmi - Cube III soul

Técnica: Iron rod

Biografía del Artista: 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 in 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 Kiefer Hablitzel Art Prize. 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 best art and design teacher in Switzerland in 2015.

LUKAS ULMI (Lucerne, Switzerland, 1958) presents his latest series under the title “Cube Soul”. The selection of pieces presented here is part of what constitutes the end of the “Visual Labyrinths” series to delve even further into a reflection on the cube which, citing one of the analytical keys of Julio González’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 “Visual Labyrinths” series and that already used the square as its central motif, is now redoubled in these new sculptures where the participation of the spectator, the kinetic and the visual and luminous effect – all of which are 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 search for—to fixate—a specific point of view from which all the lines of an apparently impossible figure that moves away from its quadrangular origins are arranged to construct the edges of one or several combined cubes. Thus, the spectator must feel each sculpture until he finds the figure, always different in each composition.