Franz GertschThe Swiss artist, acclaimed for his large-scale hyperrealist paintings that captured the frenzied energy of the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, died in hospital in Riggisberg, Switzerland, on December 21. he was 92 years old.
The death was confirmed in a statement from the Franz Museum in Burgdorf, Switzerland, which holds a large collection of his work. Gertsch is survived by his wife Maria Mir and five children.
For more than 50 years, Gertsch has devised techniques for painting and printmaking, capturing not only the likeness of his subjects, but their essence in breathtaking detail. His early scrupulous landscape gave way to a sociological study of the fringes of Swiss society: punks, performers and gender nonconformists. His High His Contrast His palette gave a spotlight effect like a Polaroid flash. These tableaus (or “portraits of situations”) have a crowded and dynamic nature that gives the impression of remembrance rather than remembrance.
“It was like watching the past reconstructed as a parallel present through photographs magnified to gigantic scale and the almost hallucinatory precision of neon-like colors,” said the Geneva-based artist. , Mai-Thu Perret writes: 2004 essay About Frieze’s Gertsch.
His most famous work is a series of five paintings of influential rocker Patti Smith. He was fascinated by Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Smith, from the cover of his 1974 debut album Horses, staring coolly in a crisp white button-down. Inviting her to pose in her studio, mocking the cameras, fiddling with amplifiers, and perpetually portraying her as she sat down and reached out to grab the trail of her thoughts. He had come to see her perform the previous year and filmed the show with her camera, flashing which had plagued Smith. She crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at him from the stage – another moment he recreated on canvas.
“Draw the world,” Gertsch once said. “Like someone who has just landed on a mountain from another planet.”
Franz Gertsch was born on March 8, 1930 in Mörigen, Switzerland. He dropped out of school to study painting at a school in Bern run by the abstract Impressionist painter Max von Mühlenen, before traveling to Europe to explore his visual style. In 1969, he completed his first large-scale painting, based on the photograph “Huaa…!” drawn from a still from the 1968 film Assault of the Light Brigade.
For nearly twenty years, he devoted himself to photorealist painting. In the early seventies, the snapshots he took of the artists Nonbinary his members of his commune became the basis for the groundbreaking painting exhibition held in Lucerne, Switzerland in 1974. Strikingly detailed and structured with a photojournalist’s sense of storytelling, the paintings shocked Switzerland’s subdued art scene.
In the 80’s he quit painting in favor of woodcuts where images are created by filling small holes with pigment. His scenes appeared as monochromatic washes of color interspersed with delicate depictions of figures and plants. This style was not well received and later reverted to photo-based painting.
He touched on his fluent style in 2011’s Oral History, saying that his path between subject and medium was “always intuitive.”
“I didn’t do it all in my head,” he said.