MASILugano Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana - 2019

Gertsch–Gauguin–Munch

Cut in Wood

12.05–22.09.2019

Curated by Franz Gertsch and Tobia Bezzola

To celebrate Franz Gertsch’s 90th birthday, MASI invited the artist to plan an exhibition devoted to his oeuvre. This has led to a remarkable and striking meeting between Gertsch’s outstanding woodcuts and the wood engravings by two artists whom he regards as much more than simply pioneer revolutionaries of xylography, Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch. Despite their historical distance and divergence of styles, the three artists display profound and unexpected affinities, which extend far beyond the technique they share.

LAC venue
Piazza Bernardino Luini 6, 6900 Lugano

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Biography

Born in 1930 in the Swiss town of Mörigen, Franz Gertsch is one of the most significant contemporary artists in Switzerland. From his international breakthrough at the Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 until the present day, he has created a wide range of paintings and graphic works with a unique approach to reality. For Franz Gertsch, reality presents both a pictorial and a conceptual challenge. Although he uses photographs or slide projections as his points of departure, his paintings follow a logic all of their own, aiming for a rightness among all the elements.