Franz Gertsch (1930–2022)

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The painting Marina schminkt Luciano (Marina Making Up Luciano) instantly transports us to the free-spirited world of the 1970s. It shows the young art student Luciano Castelli on the right, with his girlfriend Marina as she helps him get ready for a party. Here is Dr Kathleen Bühler:

'Franz Gertsch painted several portraits of Luciano Castelli. Their meeting was a remarkable encounter between a young art student, barely twenty years old, and an established forty-year-old painter. They met in Lucerne.

Franz Gertsch had been invited by Jean-Christophe Ammann to stage an exhibition, the first exhibition marking the reopening of the Lucerne Museum of Art. Luciano Castelli, meanwhile, was living with friends in a run-down villa, where they embraced what today might be described as a kind of gender-fluid utopia.

These young people partied together, wore make-up, reinvented themselves, moving beyond conventional ideas of what a man or a woman should look like. Franz Gertsch, by then almost a father figure, was welcomed into their world and became part of it. Over the course of three evenings, he took the photographs that he would later transform into a series of magnificent paintings. Today, they have become iconic images of Switzerland’s youth movement.'

The photographs on which the five paintings shown here are based were taken in a villa on Reckenbühlstrasse in Lucerne, which Luciano’s uncle had made available to him. Luciano Castelli appears in every one of these paintings. Gertsch was fascinated by the androgynous young man, himself an aspiring artist who would soon become a leading figure on the cultural scene. In all, Gertsch portrayed him in thirteen paintings.

Gertsch photographed the scene at night using flash, which gave the colours an especially harsh, luminous quality. He translated these effects into a fantastical, almost supernatural palette. As he once put it:

'But Luciano Castelli’s crowd of freaks all smoke cannabis, the whole psychedelic thing was part of it. Funnily enough, (…) there was also something psychedelic about the exaggerated colours in my paintings.'

The photograph on which the next painting is based was taken on the same occasion.