BERN.- The Kunstmuseum Bern is presenting a major retrospective devoted to Franz Gertsch, bringing together around 40 paintings that trace more than six decades of work by one of Switzerland’s most influential postwar artists. Franz Gertsch. Blow-Up (Part I) opens on August 14, 2026, and remains on view through January 17, 2027. A second part of the retrospective will open at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf on September 19.
Gertsch, who died in 2022 at the age of 92, became internationally known for monumental paintings that occupy an unusual territory between photographic precision and painterly abstraction. Developed by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in close collaboration with the artist and his family, Blow-Up was subsequently shown at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. Its presentation in Switzerland has been divided between the Kunstmuseum Bern, which focuses exclusively on painting, and the Museum Franz Gertsch, which will include paintings, woodcuts and works centered on several of the artist’s best-known models.
The Bern exhibition begins dramatically with Gertsch’s two largest paintings, each measuring four by six meters: Maria with Children of 1971 and Medici, painted in 1971–72. The latter became one of the defining images of Gertsch’s career after its presentation at documenta 5 in Kassel. From there, the exhibition moves chronologically through his early experiments, the youth and music culture of the 1970s, his portraits and family scenes, and the expansive representations of nature that occupied him during his later years. Private photographs and the original slides from which he painted in his darkened studio are also being shown.
The exhibition’s title refers to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, whose exploration of photography, perception and truth had a profound resonance for Gertsch. Photography provided him with a point of contact with reality, but the act of painting transformed that reality. Seen from a distance, his canvases can appear almost photographic; approached closely, however, figures and landscapes dissolve into fields of individual marks and color.
Gertsch was born in Mrigen on Lake Biel in 1930 and encountered the work of Ferdinand Hodler and Paul Klee early in life at the Kunstmuseum Bern. His training initially drew him toward the Flemish Old Masters and the Italian Renaissance, and his earliest still lifes, landscapes and mythological scenes demonstrate an exacting naturalism. During the 1960s, however, Pop Art opened a radically different path. Images of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones and Franoise Hardy taken from popular magazines began to appear in his work.
A decisive breakthrough came with Huaa…! in 1969. Gertsch photographed magazine images, projected the resulting slides onto canvas and painted directly from them, establishing the method that would define much of his mature career. He soon abandoned magazine imagery in favor of photographs he took himself, turning his camera toward his family and his immediate social environment.
In paintings such as Maria with Children, ordinary private moments were enlarged to an almost cinematic scale. Gertsch later became fascinated by the young Lucerne artist Luciano Castelli and his circle, whose experimentation with identity, sexuality, art and social conventions embodied the cultural upheavals of the 1970s. Works including At Luciano’s House, Marina Making Up Luciano and Luciano I transformed scenes from that milieu into imposing pictorial monuments.
Nature increasingly became central after Gertsch moved with his family to an old farmhouse in Rschegg in the Canton of Bern in 1976. In the 1980s he turned away from contemporary social subjects and began treating human figures and the natural world with equal intensity. His late paintings linger on grasses, foliage, water and forest paths, often on an enormous scale. The Guadeloupe Triptych of 2011–13, conceived as an homage to his wife Maria, places a reclining female figure within luxuriant tropical vegetation.
The second half of the retrospective, opening September 19 at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf, will concentrate on works from 1970 to 2021 and on figures including Patti Smith, Luciano Castelli and Irene Staub, alongside portraits and representations of nature. Several groups of works are being reunited after decades, while two paintings will be shown in Switzerland for the first time.
Together, the two exhibitions offer a broad reassessment of an artist who repeatedly tested the boundary between photography and painting, intimacy and monumentality, observation and abstraction. Nearly four years after his death, Gertsch’s painstaking approach to looking—and to turning a fraction of a second into months or years of painting—appears especially resonant in an era increasingly dominated by rapidly produced digital images.
