Galleri K proudly presents the first exhibition of Swiss artist Franz Gertsch in Norway. Portraits and Landscapes features eleven of the artist’s characteristic woodcuts from the past 25 years– portraits, landscapes, and nature studies in large formats – from 1988 to the exhibition’s most recent work, the double children’s portrait /seascape Saintes Maries de la Mer from 2013.
Gertsch, born in 1930, belongs to a generation of artists becoming active during the 1960s, in a post war Europe marked by the new era of consumerism and popular culture. It is natural to associate Gertsch’s figurative and photorealistic works from this period with the European Pop art movement and with contemporary colleagues such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke in Germany, as well the artist Chuck Close in the USA. Just like the three artists, Gertsch’s point of departure is the photographic image. During the 1970s, he won international acclaim with his hyperrealistic paintings, among them a series of situational portraits of the rock star Patti Smith. Of particular importance was his participation in Harald Szeemann’s legendary Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1972 (Documenta 5) with Gertsch’s 400x600 cm large painting Medici (1971) becoming one of the main attractions. Since then, he has participated three times in the Venice Biennial, and exhibited in a.o. the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in addition to opening his own museum in 2002, the museum franz gertsch in Burgdorf, outside his home city of Bern.
Gertsch would soon develop his own unique style separating him from the social commentary and ironic motifs of Pop art. He focused on atmospheric landscapes and detailed nature studies, and inscrutable close-up portraits. More important than being represented in important art exhibitions, was the time-consuming work in the studio and the concentration required for developing and elaborating the paintings’ internal logic and existentialist presence.
Most immediately compelling with Gertsch’s works is their sheer size – some of the woodcuts measure over six meters in length, many of them simply too large to be shown in an ordinary art gallery. The viewer then becomes engrossed in the details of the realistic motifs. And finally, one gazes in wonderment at the consistent use of monochrome colors in the works – each woodcut is made with one single color. Gertsch took a break from painting in 1986 to master the woodcut printmaking technique. In addition to the obvious detailed work in cutting the wooden plates, Gertsch’s graphic prints entail time-consuming mixing and color testing of binder and mineral pigments especially imported from Japan, and thorough testing of hand-made Japan paper for the best possible transfer of color from the print plates to the finished result.
Color plays a central role for Gertsch – to him, the photographic image becomes a bearer of abstract qualities in color and space, or in his own words: «The more I focus on the photographic image, the more I move away from it» – towards recognizing that color and the work has their own life, separate from the motif. Thereby follows the repetitive dwelling on each motif in a series. Gertsch can make up to a dozen variations of the same photographic point of departure, where muted colors veil the realistic image. This combination of monumental formats and subtle variations in the coloring seeks to unmask unknown and unthought-of aspects of the ordinary.
Texts
Tobia Bezzola THE WOODCUTS OF FRANZ GERTSCH
Franz Gertsch ranks as one of those artists who have not only explored new stylistic paths but also widened the technical horizons of their craft and art. This is true of Gertsch’s large acrylic paintings of the 1970s, his tempera works of the past decades and in particular, of his woodcuts. The extent to which Gertsch has pioneered new territory with his woodcuts is amply documented and honoured in literary sources. Yet the colossal effort and work invested in the technical mastery of the monumental wood engraving should not mislead us into deeming this artistry as an end in itself. The technical intelligence of Gertsch’s graphic works culminates in original creative masterpieces. Committing photographic images to wood plates to create engravings goes far beyond merely reproducing photographic images. As in the paintings, photography is revealed as no more than pale matrix, whose treasures are yet to be unlocked, to assume a creative form and unfold their full potential.
In 1986 Franz Gertsch temporarily switches his focus from painting to woodcuts. The first motifs are monumental portraits of young women. The various prints are all in different colours and thus assume the character of individual sheets. The models are no longer extravagantly exotic as in the paintings of the past (“Irene”, “Patti Smith”), but fleeting chance acquaintances from Gertsch’s immediate rural neighbourhood and sphere. It seems as if Gertsch, having long devoted himself to artificial contrived worlds and life forms, turns in the mid 1980s to focus his art on naturalness and the quest for freedom and spontaneity. In this spirit, (from 1988) landscapes from his close environs (“Rüschegg”, “Schwarzwasser”) soon join his palette of motifs, finishing with plant studies and a monumental nude (“Maria”, 2001).
Franz Gertsch has always rejected art that recognises no limits, rules or constraints. He confronts the bold gestures and revolts of the 1960s with self-assurance, creating disciplined painting that moves within the creative parameters of the selected technique, patiently feeling his way, trying out and optimising the possibilities. The tension between artistic creation, inspired within the specific bounds of the selected medium, deriving and developing its spirit of freedom from these very constraints, is what lends Franz Gertsch’s work its greatness. And so it is with his woodcuts. The optochemically photographed image is projected, pixel by pixel, to take on a new physical form. The shifting modulations, nuanced shades of the series of individual prints, evoke a beauty and discreet visual richness that surpasses the realms of the possible and imaginable.
//
Rainer Michael Mason L I K E A L A N D S C A P E
Like a landscape. It is thus that since more than a quarter of century I perceive the woodcutportraits by Franz Gertsch or better: his prints bring forth faces in which one's eye is quickly immersed: the work of art becomes the visual metaphor which guides not towards another object, but towards a way of looking related to another genre. That of landscape, which one wanders through and in which the focal point changes continuously from floating to fixed. Time is necessary to traverse Patinir or Cézanne, and time is likewise needed to go to the encounter of Franz Gertsch's monumental faces.
[Is it not in this that the creator emerges, in the divergence produced between the genre in which he works (battle, portrait, seascape, stilllife, whatever), and the type of contemplation he inscribes into it as a dimension of the work? Divergence between the aim (in the case of Gertsch: to show the vital presence) and the means utilized (in appearance, those of photography); further divergence between the reality given by the photographic image and its "de-realization" via the cutting technique, the chromatic treatment of the printing. Divergence, finally, between naturalism and realism: between the idealism of a completed spectacle and the experience of a vision coming into being. Like Alberto Giacometti, who "constructed" within the linear armature of his paintings the truth of his perception of the model, Franz Gertsch could affirm that art is nothing more than "a means of seeing"].
When I stop near Natascha (1986-1988 ; M. 4-7), Dominique (1988 ; M. 8) or Doris (1989 ; M. 10), I think at first that I am approaching a photographic document. But if I confront the print, I quickly realize that the reading of the image soon counts more than its impact. What for Roland Barthes constitutes the "punctum", that which fixes my attention, is suddenly destabilized. I cannot "stop myself at" (this detail, that surprise), any more than I can look without seeing (with indifference). Through the "grain" of the woodcut and colour printing, the head rises on the surface or recedes in the background. I pass from the volume to its dematerialization (its monumentality perhaps has something to do with it). There is a disappearance and a re-appearance in the image - and of the image. In order to enter into its space, I must seek, vary my positions as a spectator; I must accomodate, resolutely cancel the vision received from the photograph. But this is not exclusively a question of scale. By the variety of his plastic solutions, the psychological illuminations which they involve (the display of a series of prints enhances each one), the artist sharpens my comprehension of the alike and the different, denounces the narrow dimension of media representations in newspapers and on the small screen. The prints, I would like to suggest, reveal the photograph, in the sense that they permit me to enter into a process from which I am (almost) always excluded, being placed before a finished product.
Is this to say that the photograph, always chosen by Gertsch for its perfect balance between composition and content has been transposed? By means of the engraving, which in Gertsch's case is simultaneously reflection on the code registered by the plate and on the art of printing, practice in which the gesture of the painter is inverted (the brush lays on colour, the gouge takes away wood and creates a highlight which, at the moment of printing, will emerge from the paper), and finally, spiritual exercise (the artist feels a responsibility towards each point). There are no pentimenti.
The woodcuts perhaps respond to a challenging question: how can I, the "photo-realist" painter, engrave and engrave colour? Only a painter could respond with such an innovative technique. [ Commenting on the craft of Maso Finiguerra (1426-1464), Antoine de Marcenay de Ghuy wrote circa 1770 in his Idée de lagravure: " ... a Painter was needed to improve it; because one must be such in order to make prints, & if the happy genius of painting did not inspire the Printer, his efforts to succeed would be in vain".]
To engrave paintings has always been, from at least the time of Hercules Seghers, the passion of printmakers. In order to obtain the right form, inscribed in the unchanging plate, but only revealed by colour. The "complementary analysis" which Georg Baselitz as a printmaker had in mind in relation to sculpture, here becomes an irreducible formulation. The image exists between the slightest possibility of existence and the potential for a far greater substantiality. This is the lesson of Dominique (1988 ; M. 8), totally captured in the unidimensionality of an engraved plate according to a binary mode: light-paper or colour inked. It is nothing but a flat surface, green, blue or pink - in a certain way takento its limits: the form (modeled) and the colour (flat) blend in the all-over monochrome.
His pictorial culture has made of Franz Gertsch an extraordinary colorist. And his woodcuts appear today as the ideal solution of a painter. Indeed, not only because he knows how to mix pigments, but because he comprehends how to restore the balance (in a trial proof) with cool colours, compensating for the warm acidity of rose and brown. If I speak here of the printed painting, it is to underline the achievement, the inner sense of the right, which has nothing at all in common with the work of a chromist reproducing reality or of a makeup artist, even an inspired one, as was Warhol. Whether utilizing one or several overprintings, colour in Gertsch lies in colour. It is a continuum which functions outside of any expressionism. Nevertheless, from print to print, chromatism governs plasticity - and expression.
When I look at the work of art, I share at once in its spirit and emotion. One dimension is linked to the other. Human and artistic concerns accompany each other: the materialism and rigorous exteriority of photo-realism have never motivated Franz Gertsch. If for the sake of convenience he is situated in the history of the 1970's as the painter of formats outside the norm and photographic mimetism, it is largely by coincidence, because he has followed his own path, apart from the hyper-realists, mostly Americans, without ever aiming for their neonaturalism which makes pure visuality attached to objects the apparent decisive content of their paintings. This distant pragmatism is foreign to Franz Gertsch, who increasingly in the last two decades has taken into consideration his relationship with human reality, which is made visible and composed via photography - made more substantial by the coming and going between distance and proximity in which he elaborates the image, whether painted or engraved.
Franz Gertsch is strongly attached to that which he calls the presence of life, the exterior signs of which he has excluded over the years. Space is simplified; he works on homogeneous backgrounds, wiping out perspective and temporal attributes. At the time when the artist distanced himself from group scenes, then from isolated personages, to concentrate (beginning in 1980) on faces, and reached the most intimate level, his art opened onto the objectivation of printmaking! And the existential density captured by Gertsch here affirms itself, preserved in the restraint of certain prints.
As I have suggested, this new step is precisely linked to the content of the work, which it would nevertheless be false to call Natascha, Dominique or Doris, because they themselves are absent. Indeed, the ineluctable emotional involvement of the artist in his subject, according to a certain Chinese princess, is not truly possible, except to the degree that he feels sufficient distance from his model, so that only this removed model and the artist are necessary to the work of art. It is only at the price of this withdrawal that Franz Gertsch can, in the words of Ludwig Hohl, "immerse himself in things," dedicate himself to his fantasy, which is the work produced by his need to see what this will resemble. This is why he commits so much energy and craft .
It is not the recollection of the collosal head of Constantine in Rome, or the desire to render an inaccessible goddess, that causes him to enlarge a face ten times, or to reduce in the same proportion a corner of a familiar garden or neighborhood, as Rüschegg (1989 ; M. 9), Schwarzwasser I (1990 ; M. 12) or Das große Gras (2001 ; M. 24). Only the chosen ampleness of the surfaces (without question monumental), permit Gertsch the subtlety of formal definition which he gives to his images and which multiply the propositions to the promenader that I am in this landscape. In turn, one finds a charming blue, a vibrating honeycombed structure, a modulation of a cheek, a dense head which emerges from a ground, a seductive potentiality, a place enclosed in vegetation, a hardly disturbed water, an impassive grass, even an unattainable body - but above all a true work of art. It is by these means between the real and its reflections, that the painter-printmaker arranges another order of images, offered to physical and spiritual experience, analogues born of a personal encounter and inhabited up to the borders of the anonymous, as already were the Fayum portraits, and those "metaphors without ressemblances," icons.
This experience is renewed for me today as in 1989. Since this date Franz Gertsch added of course two faces (Vera, 1994 ; M. 19 | Silvia, 2002 ; M. 30) and a nude (Maria, 2001 ; M. 25). But it is especially the nature, the water, the stones, the plants and some places of country that increased so far his printed work. And my intuition had been trodden up to that point. Whatever they are, Franz Gertsch's woodcuts invite to enter it like a landscape. There is no discrepancy between the subjects. The artist still poses only the question of the art.
1989-2016
