Bernhard Luginbühl

"Blauer Ritter" – there it stands, massive and blue, a benign sentry keeping watch over visitors in the foyer outside the EPO's plenary chamber. Swiss artist Bernhard Luginbühl (*1929 Berne, CH; †2011 Langnau im Emmental, CH) uses scrap from junkyards to build his giant sculptures. Like his close friend Jean Tinguely (*1925 Fribourg, CH; †1991 Berne, CH), a leading exponent of kinetic art and famous for his large-scale moving sculptures, Luginbühl finds in industrial waste the raw material for his sculptures. As an object artist, he sees beauty in the particular aesthetic quality of industrial waste, and the beauty of the material grows and flourishes under his skilled hand through recontextualisation as an artwork. In his sculptures, the materials used and the form take centre stage; but these materials are never modified, only combined with other objects. The blue elements that make up "Blauer Ritter" were originally moulds for machine parts. The epitome of precision craftsmanship, such moulds were used to forge metal with millimetre accuracy until overtaken by plastic forms in the 1970s. Luginbühl's "Blauer Ritter", which incorporates the decommissioned precision parts of some unknown machinist, pays tribute to a tiny slice of industrial history.