Artist: Anne Morgenstern

"People like you and me, darling, we don't get to ride off into the sunset.
But we get to stay around and watch the stars come out.
And that's not nothing, I suppose." – Sam Young in Black Doves

Lullin + Ferrari presents Sunset Sour, Anne Morgenstern's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Shown here for the first time, the series is the result of a long-term visual research into places of layered histories where opulence meets decay, and where time leaves its mark on architecture and bodies alike.

Everything in these images awaits the sun — the protagonist, and perhaps the narrator, of this tale of decadence, excess, and ineluctable decay. Morgenstern captures a society at a tipping point, one that desperately wants to keep everything as it is: youth, power, wealth, the present arrangement of things. As in a Greek tragedy, the end is already written, and every action taken against fate only circles back to it. Ruins, scars, wrinkles, and fading paint appear as omens of this looming collapse; the body becomes a seismograph of these forces and, ironically, their executor. What is lost in the grip, Morgenstern suggests, is not time itself but the pleasure of it — the lightness, joy, and acceptance that make the passage of time a privilege rather than a threat.

And yet Sunset Sour is not a lament. Moving between portraiture, urban detail, and still life, Morgenstern holds bodies, interiors, and landscapes in the same saturated register, each marked by a comparable tension between opulence and wear, resistance and surrender — and insists that everything touched by time is not lessened but grows more magnificent for it: freckled and tanned skin, weathered marble, feathery processed hair. Against a world conditioned to see only the new as worthwhile, she finds richness precisely in what is marked, altered, and worn. Time is not denied here, nor fought; it is acknowledged as the very thing that gives these surfaces their depth. Capricious and egoistic, the sun gives light, heat, beauty, and hope — all the more worth savouring for being fleeting. Morgenstern offers us slivers of an ambivalent, suspended time: an invitation to loosen the grip, and to enjoy the sun before it sets.

Anne Morgenstern (*Leipzig, Germany) is a photographer based in Zurich, Switzerland. Her work explores human relationships and societal conventions, capturing quiet, subtle moments that reveal deeper narratives. She was awarded Photographer of the Year at the Swiss Press Awards 2025 for her story 'Swifties'. In 2023, she won the Hansel-Mieth-Prize for outstanding reportage together with Rudi Novotny (text) for Ich will eine normale Frau sein. Einfach so—the story of Ella—published in ZEIT Magazin. Her photobook MACHT LIEBE, awarded the Swiss Design Award in 2022, was published by Hartmann Books the same year. The series was shown in an accompanying solo exhibition, Indocile and Tender, curated by Danaé Panchaud, at the Centre de la Photographie Genève (2022), at KGold Gallery, Lesvos (2025) and most recently at Fotofestival Lenzburg (2026).

For her book Land ohne Mitte, she spent time with residents of Saxony, documenting their daily lives and aspirations. The project won the German Photo Book Prize in 2016. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the International Center of Photography, New York; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Stadtmuseum Munich. The exhibitions featuring her work include Chosen Family—less alone together at Fotomuseum Winterthur (curated by Nadine Wietlisbach) and Liminal Moments at the gallery Lullin + Ferrari (Zurich, Switzerland).

Her photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including AnOther Magazine, Best Fashion, BLAU Magazin, Bolero, Brand Eins, Das Magazin, Das Wetter, Der Spiegel, DU Magazin, FAZ Quarterly, Galore, Hochparterre, Konfekt, Libération, Max Joseph, Marie Claire, Monocle, NZZ Magazin, Republik, SZ Magazin, The Financial Times, VOGUE Germany, VOGUE Greece, Weltkunst, ZEIT, and ZEIT Magazin, among others.