Reflets sur une Tombe: Marc-Antoine Fehr – Ausgewählte Werke 1974–2023 at Museum Franz Gertsch

A tendency toward monumental formats, a commitment to tradition-bound figuration and perspective, and a disparate repertoire of motifs drawn from everyday life characterize the works assembled here, which Marc-Antoine Fehr (b. 1953) has produced and developed over fifty years of artistic practice. The Swiss artist, who exhibits internationally and lives in Burgundy, has been engaged with figurative painting since his early beginnings in the 1970s, often working in cycles within the classical genres of portrait, landscape, and still life.

Fehr frequently opens hermetic, interlocking, empty or suspended pictorial spaces, into which he applies subjects in a grainy, sometimes fresco-like painterly manner. In their composition, these motifs appear almost outside of time—like a memory or an elegy: cloths, frames, hunting trophies, vitrines, figures seen from behind or in a state of somnambulant detachment.

The book accompanies the retrospective exhibition Reflets sur une tombe, presented at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf from September 2023 to March 2024. In three substantial essays, the art historians and curators Anna Wesle, Katharina Holderegger, and Beat Wismer examine Marc-Antoine Fehr’s autonomous and suggestive pictorial worlds—situated between fantasy and realism—and explore their rich connections within both earlier and more recent art history.