Lueg is Land: An artist residency by Siegfried Contemporary

Set in the Saanenland, the Alpine region of the Bernese Oberland surrounding Gstaad in western Switzerland, Lueg is Land is an artist residency initiated by Siegfried Contemporary. The residency takes place in a historic chalet of the same name. In Swiss German, Lueg is Land can also be understood as an invitation: look out into the land.
 
The Swiss Alps have long attracted artists and writers seeking distance, concentration and new ways of seeing. They have been painted as sublime nature and shaped into powerful images of national identity and escape. Yet the mountains have also offered space for artistic independence and experimentation. Marguerite Burnat-Provins, who came to the Valais at the turn of the twentieth century, became an early advocate for the protection of its landscape, while Clara Porges made the Engadin the centre of her artistic life. Later, international artists including Marina Abramović and Jenny Holzer came to the high Alps through the experimental FurkArt project, treating the mountains themselves as a site of artistic production. Lueg is Land takes this history as a point of departure rather than a model to be repeated.
 
Today, it is increasingly evident that landscape cannot be understood simply as something in front of us. A mountain is also geology, water, agriculture, labour, infrastructure, memory and sound. It is inhabited by human and non-human life, transformed by use and subject to increasingly visible environmental change. What appears permanent is in constant motion.
 
The residency therefore asks a deliberately open question: What can landscape mean today?
 
Artists are invited to spend time in the Saanenland and develop their own response to the place. No particular medium or definition of landscape is prescribed. It may begin with direct observation, but it may equally emerge through sound, material, movement, ecology, memory or abstraction. The Alps are understood not as a picturesque backdrop, but as a living environment shaped by natural processes and human activity.
 
Time is central to Lueg is Land. Rather than offering a brief encounter with an impressive setting, the programme encourages sustained attention: returning to places, experiencing different seasons and observing change. Each invited artist contributes another perspective to an evolving enquiry into the Saanenland and into our relationship with the environments we inhabit.

  • First resident, 2026–27: Barnaby Hosking

    British artist Barnaby Hosking inaugurates Lueg is Land with a project unfolding across the four seasons of 2026 and 2027....
    British artist Barnaby Hosking inaugurates Lueg is Land with a project unfolding across the four seasons of 2026 and 2027. His participation also marks a return: Hosking first came to Gstaad as an artist in residence in 2009.
    Working repeatedly in the landscape, Hosking approaches the Saanenland through painting and extends his observations into sculpture, ceramics and sound. His project follows a recurring idea in his work: the groove — found in the grain of wood, the contours of a landscape, the spiral of a vinyl record and the traces left by making.
    Here, landscape becomes more than an image. It is something walked through, listened to, touched and experienced over time. The residency will culminate in Hosking’s solo exhibition Into the Groove, opening at Siegfried Contemporary in Saanen on 31 July 2027.
     
    At its centre will be The Ark, a charred wooden box measuring approximately seventy centimetres on each side that unfolds into a complete environment incorporating painting, furniture, a turntable, sound and a ceramic tea service made in the artist’s London studio. Hosking’s own compositions, developed in response to the landscape, will be pressed onto vinyl and incorporated into the work.
     
    Barnaby Hosking: Into the Groove
    At Siegfried Contemporary, Saanen
    Opening 31 July 2027