PERSON OF THE WEEK: BRIGITTE LUSTENBERGER
Thank you Nicolai Morawitz well researche portrait of mine in the Hauptstadt.
Person of the Week: Brigitte Lustenberger
Transience, sensuality, and the relationship with one’s own body – Bernese artist Brigitte Lustenberger has developed a distinctive style and is being honored with the Jungck Award for Women Artists for her work
“Even in decay there is beauty. Even the aging of skin can hold something delicate and tender,” Lustenberger says in an interview. She refers to her photobook «An Apparition of Memory,» in which she creates intricate light images of flowers. Her approach appears precise, almost surgical.
The trained historian is familiar with the historical conditions of photography, as Bernese author Martin Bieri once wrote about her. In installations such as «This Sense of Wonder,» Lustenberger works with old light tables and slide projectors that cast images into the space: insect corpses, wings, membranes. There it is again – transience.
For Lustenberger, whose studio is located in the former Loeb warehouse (Altes Loeblager) in Weyermannshaus, transience is a central theme – not only in nature but also in the human body. The jury of the Jungck Award commends her for a «sensitive and critically reflective gaze on the representation of the female body.» Lustenberger, they note, explores «seeing and being seen,» making the fragility, sensuality, and poetry of impermanence visible. She frequently photographs her own body: «I photograph myself because I cannot objectify myself.»
Amelie Rose Schüle, director of the Fotoforum Pasquart in Biel, has collaborated with Lustenberger for many years. Her admiration runs so deep that one of Lustenberger’s works, Flowers XXIX, hangs in her own bedroom. «She creates classical portraits and still lifes of flowers, and in doing so remains completely authentic. I have enormous respect for that,» Schüle said in an interview with the Bieler Tagblatt.
At 56, Lustenberger has already received several awards for her work, most recently at the Darmstadt Days of Photography and with the Canton of Bern’s grant for art, photography, and architecture. With the Jungck Award, which she received yesterday, Friday, she is awarded a prize of 15,000 Swiss francs.
Lustenberger’s art can be seen until November 1 at the Galerie Béatrice Brunner on Nydeggstalden.
Hauptstadt
By Nicolai Morawitz, October 18, 2025