Cow

History of the work

Behind the kindergarten of Statthalter school, on the side facing Bümplizstrasse, stands a cow made of iron. Bernhard Luginbühl made it in 1958. The city's building inventory lists it as the artwork of the school complex at Wangenstrasse 9–13, and the photographs on Wikimedia Commons also show it in front of the building at Wangenstrasse 11.

The school is older than the sculpture. Hans Brechbühler and his assistant Niklaus Morgenthaler won a competition among eight invited architectural firms in 1948; the complex, with fourteen classrooms, a gym and a kindergarten, was built in 1949/50. Annex buildings are connected to the three-storey main building by covered walkways. The city's heritage office classes the complex as worthy of protection and sees it as one link in the series of modern Bernese school buildings that began with Stapfenacker school.

Luginbühl, born in Bern in 1929, was the son of a butcher from the Lorraine district. According to SIKART, a fascination with animals, especially large ones, runs through his entire work; later came bulls, giraffes, elephants and dinosaurs. At the end of 1949 he showed a first bull made of iron at the Christmas exhibition of Bernese artists in the Kunsthalle, and from 1953 he worked almost exclusively in this material. He often collected his finds at scrapyards. The cow of 1958 therefore dates from the first decade of his work in iron, when most of his sculptures were still rather small.

In 1966 Luginbühl moved to a farmhouse in Mötschwil in the Emmental, where a sculpture park has been open to the public since 1998; since 2007 there has also been a Luginbühl Museum in the Old Slaughterhouse in Burgdorf. He died in Langnau im Emmental in 2011. If you visit the cow at Statthalter school, you will find it not on the street but behind the kindergarten: the work stands in the middle of the youngest children's daily routine.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Kultur Stadt Bern, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (offene Daten) · Wikipedia (de): Bernhard Luginbühl · SIKART: Bernhard Luginbühl · HLS: Bernhard Luginbühl · Bauinventar Stadt Bern: Wangenstrasse 9, 11, 13 · Wikimedia Commons: Eisenplastik Kuh (Bernhard Luginbühl 1958)