Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (acquired in 2004 from Galerie im Park, Contemporary Fine Art, Burgdorf, Switzerland)

Cf. exh. cat.: Franz Gertsch – Holzschnitte – Aus der Natur gerissen. Bad Homburg, Museum Sinclair-Haus, 2013, cat. no. 30, p. 125

Franz Gertsch’s monumental colour woodcut “Silvia” belongs to a series of large-scale female portraits that the Swiss artist explored intensively from the 1980s onwards. The work is based on his painting “Silvia I” of 1998 and was created between the paintings “Silvia II” and “Silvia III”. The young model depicted was part of Gertsch’s personal circle. Measuring approximately 192 × 177 cm, the portrait has a compelling presence: “Silvia” gazes calmly and directly out of the image, yet her expression does not lend itself to any definitive psychological interpretation. Instead, a peculiar tension emerges between the lifelike rendering of her face and the detached, almost timeless quality of the image.
Gertsch’s later woodcuts are characterised by a technique in which the image develops through a finely balanced interplay of points of light and areas of colour. Unlike the traditional woodcut, in which contours are often defined by black lines, form here is created primarily through the light areas left unprinted and their relationship to the printed colour. The result is a delicate veil that envelops the faces, lending the realistically rendered subjects an almost visionary, icon-like presence. For “Silvia”, the individual impressions were printed in different colour combinations, making each sheet unique. The monumental scale, restrained expression and subtle interplay between photographic precision and painterly abstraction lend the work a particular ambivalence: “Silvia” appears at once close and inaccessible, both a real person and a portrait suspended outside time. IS