Huaa ...!
Huaa ...! is a photorealistic painting by the Swiss artist Franz Gertsch from 1969.
description
The landscape-oriented image with the onomatopoeic title and the masses 170 × 261 cm was after a photographic model with emulsion paint painted on unprimed cotton linen.
It shows an officer riding from left to right, holding his drawn saber up almost vertically in his right hand and holding the reins of his white horse with his left hand. He is sitting upright and leaning back, perhaps soon to sink back, with his head up on the horse and seems to be screaming with his mouth wide open. Apparently he has just been hit by a bullet or a weapon. The horse's head is also upright, its ears set up, its eyes and mouth wide open.
Although the image section only extends down to the rider's thighs or the horse's chest, the posture of both the rider and the horse, the flying hair on the head and mane and the blurred motion of the yellow-green background give the impression of being one wild gallops awakened. The top edge of the picture cuts off the tip of the saber, the right edge runs directly in front of the animal's mouth, the left one directly behind the tips of the hair of the helmetless rider.
This zooming creates a simple and dense composition. A green stripe in the background, which begins on the right side of the picture a little above the center and ascends diagonally to the upper left corner, traces the line that is formed by the horse and human head and, in turn, at an acute angle to the approx horizontal lines of the reins and the horse's back. The result is a wedge-shaped or rather arrow-shaped composition that underlines the movement of horse and rider to the right.
Although the green stripe, like the color elements of the background as a whole, does not represent a specifically recognizable object, one believes to be able to imagine a tree-lined landscape in the background, which is given a dramatic aspect by the yellow areas. The yellow color, which can be reminiscent of fire, perhaps also of muzzle flashes and gunpowder smoke, is concentrated below the horse's head and in the upper part of the center of the picture, thus also forming a strip rising from the bottom right to the top left.
Position in the complete works
Gertsch's picture Huaa ...! marked the beginning of his brightly colored photorealistic works of the 1970s. It is said that Gertsch learned how to paint from now on while climbing Monte Lema .
Gertsch himself emphasized the important role of this key picture in the development of his work by naming the picture work no . However, it sets itself apart from later paintings of this phase, such as Medici or Marina, Luciano still removes make-up in that Gertsch did not use his own photography as a template, but took a film still from a magazine. The picture was taken from the anti-war film The Charge of the Light Brigade , which themed the Battle of Balaklava in 1854. The picture Vietnam , which was taken a little later, also dealt with the subject of war .
Gertsch later photographed his originals himself, such as the circle around Luciano Castelli . The images were projected onto the canvas and then executed with paint in a pointillist manner.
Huaa ...! is still in the artist's possession and is part of the Franz Gertsch Museum. In the course of the retrospectives on the occasion of the painter's 75th birthday, however, it was also shown in various other locations.
Web links
- Image of the painting and data on it in the SIKART Lexicon on Art in Switzerland
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jan-Geertgen Philipp Meurer: Nature in the awareness of the difference: Franz Gertsch and Caspar David Friedrich . LIT Verlag, Münster 2012, p. 90 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed February 12, 2017]).
- ↑ «It's almost a self-portrait of what I'm doing here». In: Tages-Anzeiger . April 15, 2010, accessed February 12, 2017 .
- ↑ Faryal Mirza: Projecting a global image of success. In: Swissinfo . November 30, 2007, accessed February 12, 2017 .