Brigitte Lustenberger. A Gaze of One’s Own

In her exhibition in the Cabinet of the Museum Franz Gertsch, Brigitte Lustenberger (*1969) is presenting works based on both analogue and digital photography techniques in combination with installations. The Swiss artist’s latest groups of works deal with the evanescence and vulnerability of humans and nature alike.

Opening, Friday, 12 June 2026, 6.30 pm

Brigitte Lustenberger devotes her artistic practice to the intensive exploration of photography and is especially interested in the medium’s inherent connection to themes such as evanescence, memory, and the fragility of life. The artist’s work is also defined by her critical approach to the representation of the female body in photography and the concomitant questions of seeing and being seen (“the gaze”). Oscillating between craft, art, and science, Lustenberger often combines analogue and digital photography techniques in her work.

The two groups of works in her exhibition are both dedicated to evanescence and vulnerability – “A Gaze of One’s Own” and “An Apparition of Memory”. “A Gaze of One’s Own” centres on the female body, whose representation and visibility the artist explores from a personal, but also critically reflective perspective. “An Apparition of Memory” is the result of an experimental photographic process she developed by turning wilted blossoms into the medium for a poetic pictorial language, and thus, into fragile photograms. Both groups of works are part of a multi-layered dialogue with art historical references to perception, time, and memory.

Lustenberger has developed her own photography techniques: she fragments, deconstructs, and reassembles images to challenge her own gaze. The theme of perishability and age is also manifest in the materiality of her works. In addition to the pictures on the walls, she is also showing installations in the exhibition space. She often merges analogue and digital photography, and thus, old and new techniques. Two eras of the photographic image meet, and within this interplay the defining factor of Lustenberger’s work evolves: the searching, questioning photographic gaze.

Brigitte Lustenberger was born in Zurich in 1969. She studied at the University of Zurich from 1989 to 1996 and wrote her licentiate thesis on Robert Capa’s and Gerta Taro’s photographs of the Spanish Civil War. In 2007 she obtained a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Photography and Related Media at Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York. Lustenberger has received several awards, and her works have been shown in national as well as international group and solo exhibitions. The artist has been a guest lecturer at the University of Basel and at the Bern Academy of Arts. Brigitte Lustenberger lives and works in Bern.

The show was curated by Anna Wesle in collaboration with the artist.