On Friday, curator Anne Wesle presented “Color Samples,” the final exhibition she put together with the recently deceased artist Franz Gertsch.
If you stand at a greater distance in front of the works, some of them look like excerpts from photographs: the color sample for Gertsch’s “Natascha IV” (1987-1988), for example, on which only a tuft of hair can be seen. Or the pattern for «Dominique» (1988), which only shows one eye with eyelashes as precise as the real thing.
The closer one gets to the picture, the more unrecognizable the clear forms become and the dots and longer furrows that Franz Gertsch cut into the wood panel before the printing process come to the fore instead. A razor-sharp image can suddenly only be recognized as an abstract structure.
“It is sometimes almost impossible to imagine that you can get such pictures with woodcuts,” said curator Anne Wesle on Friday during the press tour of the exhibition. And yet “colour samples” are not primarily about showing the fascination of this technique, which has had such a strong influence on Franz Gertsch’s work since the 1980s. The focus, as the title of the exhibition suggests, is on the colors.
The colors very often reflected the mood in which the artist, who died on December 21, 2022 at the age of 92, was on the day of mixing, explained Anne Wesle. In the so-called “printing diaries”, in which Gertsch’s wife Maria recorded details of the color samples, specially created color designations such as “yew green” can be found. And information about the weather on that day or little anecdotes about how the artist came up with these names. However, these documentations are not part of the exhibition.
A comparison of an orange color woodcut on Kumohadamashi Japanese paper hanging right at the entrance to the exhibition room with the invitation to the exhibition opening distributed by the museum also shows how impressive it is to look at the originals of the color samples arranged chronologically by year. You can see the same picture in two totally different color nuances. “Franz Gertsch liked to add neon pigments to his paints,” says the curator. However, these are often difficult to depict, as can be seen impressively from this flyer.
Franz Gertsch had around 700 color samples printed and stored. He has repeatedly exhibited parts of it in the past. Anne Wesle emphasized during the tour that these are never test prints, but finished woodcuts that the artist used in his Bern printing studio to check the nuances and quality of the colour. Only then did he decide in which tone the large sheet should be printed.
The “Color Samples” exhibition gives visitors an insight into the studio, the handling of color and the intricacies of the printing process. The color samples “not only have a technical function, but also invite aesthetic and philosophical considerations,” reads the description of the exhibition.
We also recommend a subsequent tour of the “Kaleidoscope” exhibition, which the Franz Gertsch Museum opened last September to mark its 20th anniversary. There you can see the end products of some color samples, Gertsch’s large-format masterpieces, “The Big Grass” for example. This exhibition runs until March 5th.
The commemoration of Franz Gertsch’s death will take place on February 13. The event, which begins at 2 p.m. in Bern Minster, is open to the public. This will be followed by an aperitif in the town hall of Bern, to which anyone who is interested can also enter without registering.