Swiss artist Franz Gertsch, born in 1930, is one of the most important exponents of photorealism worldwide. Yet unlike many of his fellow artists, he takes liberties when translating a photograph into one of his large-format paintings or prints, thus animating his depictions of human faces or landscapes.

This volume offers a close look at a single key work by Gertsch, Rüschegg, created in 1988.It was both his first attempt in woodcut for a landscape and his first large-format work in that genre. Having abandoned painting a few years earlier, he developed a special woodcut technique, and, having worked in portraiture almost exclusively for many years, Gertsch he used that technique to begin an exploration of nature.

Starting from a view of his garden in the Swiss village of Rüschegg, Gertsch singled out some of its elements, such as a footpath, rocks, shrubs and trees, grass and leaves, taking them as individual motifs first for woodcuts and later for monumental “portraits” of such pieces of nature. Thus, Rüschegg also stands for Gertsch’s movement away from the representation of humans to that of nature, just as it links his later work with the landscape studies of his early years.