Throughout an artistic career spanning almost 60 years, Ingeborg Lüscher has created a multifaceted oeuvre that stays close to the heart while also cultivating a striking openness to the world around. Now an exhibition at the Centre culturel suisse in Paris is showing a selection of her works from various periods.

Ingeborg Lüscher has quite literally had enough career for two. Before she decided to dedicate her life to the visual arts in the late 1960s, Lüscher worked as an actress. ‘In fact, I always had a great enthusiasm for acting,’ she tells me over the phone from her home in the Swiss canton of Ticino, where she has lived since 1967. ‘Right from the start, I landed big roles in TV and on the stage. Nothing suggested that I would ever leave this job,’ she adds. Lüscher was born in Freiberg, Saxony, in 1936, before her family relocated to West Berlin in the late 1940s. But then things changed. In 1967, while in Prague shooting a film, she became acquainted with some dissidents who would later be involved in the Prague Spring of 1968 – a short-lived and rapidly suppressed period of reform in socialist Czechoslovakia. It was an encounter that resonated deeply with her, and one that significantly altered the course of her life.

‘What am I doing compared to them?’ is how she recalls her feelings at the time. ‘I speak someone else’s text. I follow a director’s instructions.’ So Lüscher decided to make a radical break. Soon after her return to Ticino, she rented the old Locarno studio of Hans Arp, co-founder of Dadaism and one of the central figures of the European interwar Avantgarde. Lüscher wanted to become an artist, taking things into her hands – no longer speaking anybody else’s texts, nor following anyone’s instructions but her own. Still, she ‘never regretted being an actress,’ as she is keen to stress during our conversation. ‘I followed my first job with great passion,’ she says, ‘I was almost one with it. Just that now something else had become important.’

‘Being one with something’ and consequently follow what you feel is important: this sounds like an apt description of Lüscher’s intuitive yet reflexive and responsive approach to life in general and art in particular. It also says a lot about the proximity between her work and her biography. ‘What I do has to be related to my life,’ is how she describes her central guiding principles at the time. ‘It must have something to do with me. Otherwise, there is no reason for me to do art.’ Hers is an approach that is ready to make change happen by accepting chance, as it were, by letting yourself be transformed by encounters and situations. In some respects, such an approach surely also responds to the specific situation of many women artists at the time. ‘The professional careers of women of Ingeborg Lüscher’s generation’, curator Bettina Steinbrügge recently wrote in an essay on Lüscher’s work, ‘are frequently defined by interruptions and breaks, i.e. they are less marked by continuity than those of men and heavily influenced by individual life circumstances as well as their associated changes.’

Lüscher soon found a material (or medium) that seems to embody change and transformation like no other: fire. ‘I was fascinated by fire’s ambivalence between destruction and fertility,’ Lüscher says. Many of her first works made use of fire or found compelling images for the power of flames. Her so-called ‘Inboxes’ (1968–69) consist of layered polystyrene plates she partly burnt down, extinguished, and painted in various colours, creating peep boxes with melted and abstracted miniature landscapes – a look ahead, if you will, and a fertile ground for things to come. Some of those works are now on view in ‘Flammes’, Lüscher’s fittingly titled exhibition at the Centre culturel Suisse in Paris. Included in the show are also examples of another iconic early strand of her practice: collages and objects made of countless cigarette stubs which the artist has been collecting over the years from friends and acquaintances. ‘Each stub contains a piece of the person who smoked it, a piece of a biography,’ Lüscher points out, explaining the attraction this peculiar material had for her. ‘A cigarette stub is an expression of a life lived.’

A crucial factor in her outward-looking approach was that throughout the process of searching for her own artistic expression, Lüscher invariably included, turned to, and appreciated others in her work, ultimately relating her own personal journey to those around her. Viewed from a contemporary perspective, this speaks of a remarkably self-aware response to the need for independence that avoided conflating autonomy with an entirely self-sufficient and closed-off self. Just take ‘Das Gästebuch’ (The Guestbook, 1973–89), a series of works in which she portrayed visitors to her home, or the extensive and long-running ‘Zaubererfotos’ (Magician Photos, since 1976), for which she has hitherto asked around 500 people ‘to perform magic, whatever that means for you at this moment.’

A key work, however, when it comes to appreciating others in her practice is the one that marked her breakthrough as an artist. Lüscher first encountered Armand Schulthess at home in Ticino, an area with a rich history of hosting dropouts in search of alternative lifestyles to the alienating grind of modernity (just think of the famous Monte Verità and its colony of artists and adherents of Lebensreform in the early decades of the 20th century). Schulthess was ‘a normal person who was lacking a non-normal life’, as Lüscher once put it in an interview: someone who had, at some point, decided to abandon his bourgeois life to move to the hills of Ticino, where he spent his time isolated in the woods. There he slowly transformed his premises into a ‘forest of knowledge’ by adorning the trees with countless metal plates full of quotes and passages from science, philosophy and literature – indeed all manner of sources. Trying to befriend the rather gruff and unapproachable Schulthess, Lüscher started to keep a diary of her observations and encounters while also photographically documenting Schulthess’s strange and almost bewitched forest. The resulting documentation gained her an invitation to documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972.

Schulthess’s ‘forest of knowledge’ left a lasting impression on Lüscher, and echoes of this encounter can even be found in photographs Lüscher took a good quarter of a century later. For the 1995 series ‘Omikuji’, which is part of the Julius Baer Art Collection, she documented trees outside Shinto shrines in Japan, covered in countless little paper notes, each containing a divination. Even if the context and the history may be utterly different, the formal similarities between this Japanese tradition and Schulthess’s tin messages are immediately striking. ‘These photographs directly follow my work on Schulthess,’ Lüscher says. ‘The intensity with which I experienced the trees in Japan wouldn’t have been possible without the intensity with which I experienced Schulthess’s forest so intensely.’

Alongside her photographic work, which remains a vital part of her artistic practice, Lüscher developed a highly distinctive style of abstract painting and rather minimal sculpture, frequently constructed around a specific yet highly unusual artistic material: sulphur. Often found in volcanic areas, sulphur is another substance that contains a strong link to fire and its transformative power, but it also has healing qualities. Above all, however, it was the material’s stunningly bright, glowing yellow colour that initially fascinated the artist.

Around the mid-80s, Lüscher started to use sulphur for abstract paintings like, for example, ‘Ohne Titel (Schwefelvulkan)’ (Untitled, Sulphur Volcano), a 1986 work in the Julius Baer Collection that is currently on view at the Centre culturel suisse in Paris. It is one of Lüscher’s first ‘volcano images’: a darkish abstract composition featuring a crusty-looking surface that resembles the earth itself and is reminiscent of mythical telluric powers. In these works, as in many that followed, the artist used ash mixed with acrylic to counter the dazzlingly bright sulphuric yellow. ‘Whereas sulphur almost outshines everything else, the extreme black of ash evokes a deep and all-encompassing gaze inward,’ the artist says of these two materials so central to her work. Lüscher later created comparatively large-scale and minimalist geometrical compositions that placed both materials in sharp contrast and rigid opposition.

In pairing sulphur with ash, Lüscher had found an abstract and strikingly glowing material embodiment not only of the basic dialectic of counterparts but also of their integral transformation. A smaller work like the photographic diptych ‘Tegna Fussgänger’ (Tegna Pedestrians, 1999, in the Julius Baer Art Collection) casually – indeed almost incidentally – illuminates this structural principle which is so fundamental to her approach. Echoing another similar series from two years previously, here Lüscher photographed pedestrian crossings in Ticino tinted in a yellowish light, overlayed by darkish shadows and set against the tarmac. Of course, the motif itself carries a fair amount of symbolism – a crossing from here to there, a bridge along the route – but there is also something else hidden in this work: ‘I was fascinated by how the square and rigid forms started to deteriorate,’ Lüscher tells me when I ask her about these works, ‘I liked how they open up and lose their harsh borders.’

This seems to be cutting right to the core of Lüscher’s approach: regarding binary systems and oppositions less as closed entities than about how they relate the inside to the outside, art to life, you to me. With her strong sense of freedom and a feeling for the value of chance, Lüscher always keeps a keen eye on these openings and the potential for transformation they hold in store. Because as different as things and people may be, they are also porous, influencing each other in a field of forces and relations; one is not without the other, they are always together – even when we search for a true expression of the self.

Author: Dominikus Müller

Don’t miss the exhibition ‘Ingeborg Lüscher: Flammes’ at Centre culturel Suisse, Paris, until 26 July 2026.