Contemporary photorealists undoubtedly have great technical skills, but it’s their predecessors who demonstrated that painting in such a highly realistic style was even possible. The Swiss artist Franz Gertsch was one of the first to do so, in the 1960s, using photographic prints and projections before transforming the patterns into paintings. In the 1970s, Gertsch began creating his well-known large-scale portraits. These works bring one extremely close to a subject, yet create a sense of distance through cool, almost sterile color palettes. Gertsch shifted to printmaking in the 1980s, transforming photographic materials into large, detailed woodcuts. This exhibition, curated with the artist before his death, in 2022, spans the first two decades of his career. —Jeanne Malle