Portraits and nature pieces are on display.

During this exhibition period, large-format paintings and woodcuts by Franz Gertsch are on display at the Museum Franz Gertsch. The show focuses on portraits and nature pieces.

The first room shows the four Gräser paintings from the 1990s, with which Gertsch resumed painting after a break of several years, during which he had devoted himself exclusively to developing his new woodcut technique. "Grasses I" (1995/96) shows a section of reed-like grass (forest swale) from his garden in Rüschegg, greatly enlarged. For "Gräser II" (1996/97), "Gräser III" (1997) and "Gräser IV" (1998/99), the artist used sections of his own first picture as models. In this series, Gertsch pursued a conceptual approach to his own painting by taking up the first painting again, enlarging it and playing with sections and exposures.

The second room of the exhibition is dedicated to large-format portraits alongside black-and-water woodcuts. The models for the prints shown here, "Natascha IV" (1987/88), "Dominique" (1988), "Doris" (1989) and "Silvia" (2001/02), were young women in their early twenties from Franz Gertsch's neighborhood and acquaintance. By the mid-1980s, Gertsch had developed his own style of large-format color woodcuts, which differed in important ways from his early woodcut work. While the early woodcuts were in the classic blackline style and worked with a system of black outlines, the later woodcuts are characterized by a system of so-called "light dots" - the depiction of the motif results from the interplay of the light areas of the print. Franz Gertsch used a photographic model as his starting point (as in his painting) - he translated the light of a colored slide projection into a system of incised dots and unprocessed surface when working on the limewood printing block with a gouge. The woodcuts were then printed by hand by the artist and his printing team in small editions on handmade Japanese paper. At the beginning of this phase, the artist worked on several plates for one subject and then printed different motif and tone plates on top of each other. In this exhibition, this can be seen in "Natascha IV" and "Silvia". In the other woodcuts, such as "Dominique", he printed one color with one plate and thus obtained the complete picture.

Further paintings and woodcuts by the artist are exhibited in the extension building.

The exhibition was curated by Anna Wesle.