For over 50 years, Gertsch has explored the techniques of painting and printmaking, recreating photographs into large-scale works (approximately 11 x 16 feet or larger), meticulously rendered, and taking a year to complete. Sometimes it took longer than that. , sometimes advancing by a postcard-sized portion each day.
His work has been exhibited all over the world, including One Piece, “Luciano II” A 7 x 11+ foot acrylic painting of his artist friend Luciano Castellisold for over $3 million in 2017.
Gertsch’s mastery of photorealism was also intertwined with the storytelling sensibility of a photojournalist. “Without a spiritual background in photography, there is no secret, no magic, no soul,” he once told the Swiss arts and culture magazine Du.
While other photorealist painters, such as Richard Estes and Ralph Goings, favored images such as glittering diners and glass-enclosed cityscapes, Gertsch first attracted attention as an observer of the Swiss counterculture. In the early 1970s, Mr. Gertsch documentary snapshot Among the gender-fluid members of the artist commune, including Castelli, which was the basis for the 1974 exhibition that shook up the then stagnant art scene in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Garch called them “situation portraits.” It’s a series about Castelli and other androgynous friends getting ready for a party in makeup. Cartoon butterflies and stickers on the wall seem to float in one scene. Painted in a stippled style, the paintings shimmered with high-contrast pops of flash photography and instant Polaroids.
“It was like watching the past reconstructed as a parallel present through the almost psychedelic precision and neon-like colors of photographs magnified to gigantic scale.” I have written Essay by Geneva-based artist Mai-Thu Perret for the art website Frieze in 2004.
Timothy LearyA former Harvard professor who has become a leading authority on “on, tune, dropout” LSD, he was introduced to Mr. Gertsch’s work while living in Geneva in 1971 and was “blackmailed.” It’s as enthusiastic as a new vision of reality.”
In 1975, Mr. Garch was deceived by Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Smith. “Horse.”
“The first thing that fascinated me was her face,” Gertsch said.
In 1977, Mr. Gertsch had a Nikon camera in hand when Smith performed at an event commemorating the 19th-century Surrealist poet in Cologne, Germany. Arthur Rimbaud. A year later Mr. Gertsch invited Smith to his studio for a series of portraits.
The photographs turned into some of Gertsch’s most famous works. The series of five paintings indelibly linked his visual heritage to his 1970s punk scene and the style and energy of the moment. Gertsch treated Smith not as an icon, but as part of a larger tableau of music as a business and an isolated bubble.
He shows Smith crouching in front of a stage amplifier with his back to the camera, or hovering like a waifu at the edge of the scene or in front of a towering microphone.of “Patti Smith V” Gertsch’s painting was completed in 1979.
Instead of singing, she used the microphone to talk about her dream as a young girl to one day become an artist’s muse.
“Draw the world like someone from another planet landed on a mountain.”
Franz Gertsch was born on March 8, 1930 in Mörigen, on Lake Biel, Switzerland, the only child of a primary school teacher father and a mother who ran a local restaurant.
Mr. Gertsch dropped out of school to pursue painting and took several classes at a school in Bern run by the abstract impressionist painter Max von Mühlenen. After being discharged from military service in Switzerland due to a heart condition, Gertsch traveled to places like Paris, Scotland and Italy, experimenting with different visual styles, including woodcuts and collages.
In 1969, he completed his first large-scale painting, based on a 1968 still image of a rider galloping with a saber, “Huaa…!”. movie “Assault of the Light Brigade”
his 1970Portrait of Urs Ryti‘ shows the subject in a blue blazer and sunglasses, sitting next to the camera. Critics described it as a modern interpretation of Dutch still life painting. “Medici” 1971 has become a time capsule for this era. Five young men are leaning against a barricade as hands flow and the bottom of the bell swings.
He abandoned his photo-based style in the mid-1980s and pursued exclusively intricate woodblock prints using tiny holes filled with pigment. Images such as plants created a gauzy effect floating in a monochromatic wash of red, green, or other color.
Some critics viewed his prints as too antiseptic and clinical. “Gerch may work with pear trees and the finest handmade paper, but his paintings have a metallic taste,” he said in 1990. review The Washington Post in nine prints at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. “Making his portrait is like making a machine.”
Gertsch later returned to painting based on many photographs of landscapes and nature. his series of four paintings, “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter,” A sloping wooded area near his home and studio in Russek, Switzerland, showing the changing light and environment over the course of a year.
His attention to the original photo was very precise, slightly blurring the land and foliage closest to the frame to reflect the camera’s depth-of-field imperfections.
in 2011 oral historyGertsch said his shifting art style is based on “intuitive” feelings about where to go next. “I didn’t do it all in my head.” he said.
Gertsch has five children with his wife of 59 years, Maria Mia.
In 1999, Mr. Gertsch wrote an epilogue to the book.Franz Gertsch, Silvia: Chronicle of a Painting” Norberto Gramacini and Stephen Lindbergh. Gertsch said painters have always been at a crossroads.
“Is the sole purpose of painting to refer to itself, or is it better to deal with reality?” he wrote. “I chose a radical method. Reality as painting.”