LUCERNE.- In 2026, Kunstmuseum Luzern is dedicating its exhibition program to polyphony: we experience the simultaneity of different realities that shape and challenge our society as a moment of reflection and enjoyment of art.

Maria Pinińska-Bereś: Under the Pink Flag
February 28–June 14, 2026

Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931–1999) is regarded in Switzerland as a new discovery; in her native country, Poland, she has long since been famous as a pioneer. The Kunstmuseum Luzern is devoting a comprehensive retrospective exhibition to this feminist artist.

Pinińska-Bereś’s oeuvre includes sculptures, installations and performances that engage critically with gender roles and social structures. Her work is testimony to the experiences of an artist who liberated herself from social constraints and the patriarchal order during the Cold War. She broke with the conventions of her traditional training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and developed her own formal idiom, into which she integrated soft materials like foam. The colour pink became her distinctive feature. With it she was responding to the colour red, omnipresent in Communism, while at the same time transporting her feminist message. Her sculptures are expansive, partly erotic, subtle, yet at the same time direct and full of irony.

1 Room, 1 Artwork: Installations from the Collection
February 28–November 15, 2026

This year’s collection exhibition is devoted to grand artistic gestures: one work in one room. These are not small works, but room-filling installations. Installation art extends beyond the pictorial or sculptural character of a work and usually involves the whole room. This gives rise to a particular artistic universe. Often the viewers are actively involved in observing and experiencing the work. The main focus is contemporary art, with works on show that have been acquired from the 1990s to today.

One highlight of the exhibition is the immersive room work Wantee (2013) by Laure Provoust in which the artist interweaves fiction, art history and personal history.

In order to be able to show as many installations as possible from the collection, over the course of the exhibition some works will be dismantled and replaced by others.

Shirana Shahbazi: All at Once. An Interplay with Li Tavor
July 4–October 18, 2026

Shirana Shahbazi (b. 1974) has adopted a differentiated view of our society and its challenges. Her highly aesthetic work establishes the fragment and layering as a strategy for doing justice to a complex present. Based on her experience of multiple affiliation, she examines the construction of reality. How can the experience of the simultaneity of different realities be depicted in images? How can spatial and emotional distances be grasped? Always starting with photography, but including the most diverse of techniques and materials, Shahbazi’s work eschews any obvious categorisation; it remains multi-layered and conveys polyphony as a political stance.

Shahbazi experiments with surfaces, formats, colours, space and light, and so far has not shown many of her works. In dialogue with Li Tavor (b. 1983), and complemented by works from others, the artist creates expansive installations.

In 2019 Shahbazi was awarded the Prix Meret Oppenheim, the most important art prize in Switzerland presented by the Bundesamt für Kultur.