Nolan Lucidi

The Kunsthaus Glarus showcases the first institutional solo-exhibition by Nolan Lucidi (b.2000, lives and works in Basel), presenting an installation with videos and objects titled Bildersaal. The work deals with male homosexual desire in literature and art history, as well as from personal experience. Simultaneously Lucidi explores the form language and the claim to authority in Minimalism, coupled with its legacy in popular aesthetics, overwriting it with auto-fictional and erotic narratives.

In front of the entrance to the Kunsthaus Glarus is a display case. It references the public announcement in Leukerbad (Loèche-les-Bains) memorialising the US author James Baldwin with newspaper clippings. Baldwin spent the winters of 1951 and 1952 in the mountain village in Valais, where he finished his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and his famous essay Stranger in the Village (1953). What remains unrecorded in the official history, however, is the love affair between Baldwin and the Valais artist Lucien Happersberger, in whose chalet the author stayed.

With the 2026 work Literary Architecture: Loèche-les-Bains (the light from the window lay across his chest, and I could not look away), Lucidi refers to what was for Baldwin a key relationship, which he later described as "the only true love story of his life". Although Happersberger later married, the two remained close friends until Baldwin's death. The novel Giovanni's Room (1956) – a milestone in gay literature – is dedicated to Happersberger. By foregrounding the cocooned room as a space of working and living, Lucidi shifts the focus away from the public figures to the intimate relationship and its spatial localisation.

The second part of the exhibition is situated in the side-lit gallery of the Kunsthaus Glarus. The large space is transformed into an intimate, poetic choreography of moving images with themes of seeing, being seen and desire that also incorporate the viewer. The metal objects, with echoes of works by the pioneer of Minimalism Donald Judd, become screens for cinematic counternarratives, exploring the relationship between safe space and public performance – in life, literature and art.

In contrast to the paradigmatic stance of Minimalism to raise objectivity and autonomy above emotion and metaphor, Lucidi's Screening Sculptures are anthropomorphic, narrative figures that interact in pairs or triplets, or spatially rest as solitary objects. They are simultaneously screens (monitors) and corporeal objects (volumes), which multiply themselves in the glass through reflection depending on the time of day.

Rooms, as places of refuge, of desire and as the scenes in which relationships are negotiated (be they emotional or financial), are a core starting point in Lucidi's practice. For the realisation of his essay-like image sequences, he predominantly works using a method of associative overlapping. He prints archival images of artworks, his own photographs and 3D renderings onto transparent foil and films them on a lightbox. Lucidi doesn't use the 3D renderings to speculatively invent new architectures; instead they result in a retrospective reconstruction. He draws rooms from memory or based on literary models, for instance Giovanni's Room. Through the juxtaposition and overlapping of different materials, to the point erasure, Lucidi creates visual frameworks in which the relationships between works, spaces and an array of images of masculinity are made visible. But these constellations remain deliberately unstable: they are visualised without being transposed or inscribed into clear interpretations.

On the back wall, next to the left window, is a further work, which varies according to how the natural light falls. Like a concluding bracket, it points back to the display case in front of the entrance. Two glass dials are positioned at a height of 175 cm and 166 cm respectively, set at a right angle to the wall. The 2024 work Untitled (Slice of Life) shows the portraits of Lucien Happersberger and James Baldwin etched in glass, installed at their respective heights. Like a clockwork mechanism, the faces fleetingly meet as shadows depending on how the natural light touches them.

Curated by Annette Amberg.

Nolan Lucidi (b.2000, lives and works in Basel) completed his master’s degree at the Institute Art Gender Nature at the Basel Academy of Art and Design in summer 2025. From 2019 to 2023 he studied at the ECAL in Lausanne, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. He has been variously exhibited, including: Kunstverein Freiburg; Kunst Raum Riehen; Kunsthaus Baselland; Kunstverein Olten (all 2025); Kunsthalle Basel; EAC (Les Halles) in Porrentruy ; Galerie Fabienne Levy, Genf; Der Tank, Basel; Bacio, Bern (all 2024); Art Genève mit CIRCUIT – Centre d'art contemporain Lausanne; HIT, Genf; CIRCUIT – Centre d'art contemporain, Lausanne (all 2023); Locus Solus, Prilly (2022).

The realisation of the exhibition is made possible by the generous support of: Canton de Vaud, Oertli Stiftung, GGG Kulturkick