Fall

Since October last year, the museum franz gertsch has presented the artist’s most recent monumental painting. As the first picture of a cycle devoted to the four seasons, Herbst (Autumn) – Sommer (Summer) has just been completed – is particularly impressive due to its fascinating combination of various brown and green hues. The perception of the painting is turned into an exciting visual experience for which the viewer’s active participation is demanded. The painting can be seen on the one hand as an autumnally colored forest landscape awash with light or as an almost entirely abstract painting on the other in which an amorphous array of spots merge to form an ornamental structure.

The grass picture Gräser I (1995/96) as well as the portraits Johanna I (1983/84) and Silvia III (2003/04) are being placed alongside Herbst (2007/08). This combination of landscape and portraits of women makes it particularly clear that the artist’s conceptual procedure remains the same regardless of the motif. Through the underlying slide projections and the oversized enlargements achieved by means of blow-ups, “an eye” appears like “a lake,” “a scrap of hair” like “a birch grove,” and “a shadow region” like a “dark fir forest“. Franz Gertsch consequently also characterizes his portraits of women as facial landscapes: faces are dealt with as if they were landscapes and landscapes are individualized and made recognizable.