On the occasion of the upcoming 90th birthday of Franz Gertsch, MASI invites 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 stylistic divergences, these three artists display profound and unexpected affinities, which extend far beyond the technique they share.

Franz Gertsch, born in 1930 in the Swiss town of Mörigen, is numbered among the most significant contemporary artists in Switzerland. From the time of 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, which attempt a very special approach to reality. For Franz Gertsch, reality means both a pictorial and a conceptual challenge. Although he uses photos or slide projections as his points of departure, the paintings follow a logic all of their own, which aims for a rightness among all the elements.