Franz Gertsch (born 1930) belongs amongst Switzerland’s most important contemporary artists. He achieved international fame with, partly oversize, fotorealistic paintings and woodcuts. The exhibition at Museum Sinclair-Haus displays a representative selection (around 70 works) of his woodcuts dating from 1986 to 2008.
Gertsch organically developed his landscape images from the portraits, as all of nature’s shape-generation exhibits common structures. This development is considered in the exhibition, with each of the earliest and the youngest woodcut showing portraits. Via photographic templates the landscapes are taken directly from the real environment, and through their implementation they acquire an immaterial air that transforms their image into an atmospheric field of colour. Behind a permeable screen of monochrome colour the woodcuts’ subjects continuously appear as if detached from this earth.
Franz Gertsch’s Woodcuts are marked by a prolonged process of creation. Thus time is of equal importance as subject and colour as one of the three crucial components of his work.
This exhibition, devised in cooperation with Franz Gertsch, documents the essence of his work in a concentrated selection of works.

Franz Gertsch -