Foundation for the Kunstmuseum Luzern SKL

The Foundation for the Kunstmuseum Luzern (Stiftung für das Kunstmuseum Luzern SKL) was set up in the run-up to the exhibition Turner. The Sea and the Alps in 2017. This Foundation is an independent legal entity, and the Kunstgesellschaft Luzern is the sole donor. The members of the Foundation Council are personalities from Luzern or with a link to Central Switzerland. Their activities are honorary.

The SKL finances exhibitions, supports the museum’s public positioning and presence, enables the restoration and digitization of works of art, and sponsors art education and communication. Through the SKL, the Kunstmuseum Luzern gains access to a new circle of partners, friends and patrons. The aim of the SKL is thus to strengthen the Kunstmuseum Luzern in fulfilling its core tasks, and to contribute substantially to its further development. In return, the Kunstmuseum offers exclusive occasions and logo placements, and many other things.

Since the success of the exhibition Turner. The Sea and the Alps, the Foundation has been focussing on new exceptional projects to mark the 200th anniversary of the Kunstgesellschaft Luzern. Its support is facilitating the exhibition Moving Focus, the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition in Switzerland of works by the British artist David Hockney – one of today’s most influential artists. That exhibition will present his early works from the 1960s up to and including more recent large-format landscape pictures and iPad drawings, thereby visualising the artist’s fascinatingly diverse range. Moreover, the Foundation is supporting the extensive research work involved in re-staging the legendary exhibition of 1935 Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis with works by Giacometti, Miró, Taeuber-Arp, Picasso, Braque, Calder, and others. In 2025, the Kunstmuseum Luzern reconstructs the historic exhibition under the title Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al. back in Lucerne. The works came to the museum fresh from the artists’ studios. Today, they hang in the world’s most important collections. The exhibition communicates the intellectual, political and cultural upheavals of the inter-war years. At the same time the exhibition presents an overwhelming sensual art spectacle.

Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al. back in Lucerne was a great success attracting large audiences, following on directly from the record-breaking exhibition Turner. The Sea and the Alps in the museum’s history.