Franz Gertsch (1930–2022)

Read transcript

'I transformed the ordinary subjects around the house into a universe of their own. Nature surrounded me, and there was no escaping it.'

This is what Franz Gertsch said of these works. He found their subjects right on his doorstep, in Rüschegg, in the Bernese Pre-Alps. There, in a centuries-old farmhouse at an altitude of 900 metres, surrounded by a remote rural landscape, life is intimately bound up with nature and continually inspired him to create new images.

Gräser VIII (Grasses VIII) is the eighth variation on a simple woodland grass that he discovered one day in his garden.

'One summer’s evening in 1995, I was wandering through our garden in search of a new subject (...). Then I noticed a tuft of grass by the path that stopped me in my tracks. I bent down and, through the lens of my camera, saw a section no more than about forty by forty centimetres. Before me was a wonderful world of dancing grasses against a dark background. I used up all twelve exposures on my Hasselblad. Once the film had been developed, I projected the slides onto the white studio wall at a scale of four by four metres.'

Here once again, Gertsch employed the technique of blow-up – magnifying his subject to an extreme degree. In this way, he draws us very deep into a world that would scarcely be visible to the naked eye. In this late variation, that sense of depth is intensified still further by the blue.

The painting Blauer Sommer (Blue Summer) is likewise a variation on an earlier painting, this time from Gertsch’s monumental Four Seasons cycle, painted around ten years earlier and now on display in the exhibition in Burgdorf. In that series, he depicted the same view of the small woodland behind his house through the changing seasons in naturalistic colour. Whereas Summer is a symphony of rich greens, in Blue Summer Gertsch has condensed the motif until it becomes almost impenetrable.

Gertsch’s blue paintings preserve a mystery within their dark, infinite depths – depths into which we cannot see and cannot penetrate. They no longer tell stories; they simply are. They reveal nature in a state of being, detached from any particular moment in time. They evoke eternity.

Toward the end of his life, Gertsch thus arrived at a state of profound spiritual contemplation.