Over greater than 5 many years, Mr. Gertsch explored painterly and printmaking methods to re-create pictures into large-scale works — some 11-by-16 toes or extra — that have been rendered in meticulous element and will take greater than a 12 months to finish, typically shifting forward at solely a postcard-size portion every day.

His works have been exhibited all over the world and one piece, “Luciano II,” a greater than 7-by-11-foot acrylic portray of his good friend, artist Luciano Castelli, offered for greater than $3 million in 2017.

Mr. Gertsch’s mastery at photorealism additionally intertwined with a photojournalist’s sensibility of storytelling. “If an image has no non secular background, it has no secret, no magic, no soul,” he as soon as instructed the Swiss arts and tradition journal Du.

Whereas different photorealism painters similar to Richard Estes and Ralph Goings favored photos similar to gleaming diners or glassy road scenes, Mr. Gertsch first gained consideration as an observer of the Swiss counterculture. Within the early Seventies, Mr. Gertsch took documentary-style snapshots amongst gender-fluid members of an artists’ commune, together with Castelli, that turned the idea for a 1974 exhibit that shook up the then-staid artwork scene in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Mr. Gertsch referred to as them “state of affairs portraits” — a sequence that features Castelli and different androgynous mates making use of make-up and preparing for a celebration. A cartoonlike butterfly, a sticker on a wall, appears to drift by one scene. The work, finished in a pointillism type, shimmered with the high-contrast pop of a flash picture or an on the spot Polaroid.

“It was like seeing the previous restored as a parallel current, by the just about hallucinatory precision of {a photograph} enlarged to an unlimited scale and the neon-like colours,” wrote Geneva-based artist Mai-Thu Perret in a 2004 essay within the arts web site Frieze.

Timothy Leary, a former Harvard professor who turned the “activate, tune in, drop out” guru of LSD, was launched to Mr. Gertsch’s work whereas residing in Geneva in 1971, calling it “a brand new artwork type” that was as “threatening and rapturous as any new imaginative and prescient of actuality.”

In 1975, Mr. Gertsch turned beguiled by Robert Mapplethorpe’s picture of Smith, staring confidently on the Digital Camera in a crisp white shirt, on her debut album “Horses.”

“It was her face which first fascinated me,” mentioned Mr. Gertsch.

Mr. Gertsch was available along with his Nikon digital camera in 1977 when Smith carried out at an occasion in Cologne, Germany, to commemorate the nineteenth century surrealistic poet Arthur Rimbaud. A 12 months later, Mr. Gertsch invited Smith to his studio for a spherical of portraits.

The pictures have been changed into a few of Mr. Gertsch’s most celebrated works, a five-painting sequence that indelibly related his visible legacy to the Seventies punk scene and the kinds and vitality of the second. Mr. Gertsch handled Smith not as an icon, however as half of a bigger tableau of music as a enterprise and insular bubble.

He exhibits Smith crouching in entrance of stage amps along with her again to the digital camera or hovering, waiflike, on the fringe of a scene or in entrance of towering microphones. In “Patti Smith V,” Mr. Gertsch’s portray completed in 1979, she is seated and gesturing along with her fingers as if struggling to make a degree.

As an alternative of singing, she used the microphone to speak about her desires as a younger lady to at some point turn into a muse for an artist.

“Paint the world,” Mr. Gertsch mentioned, “like somebody who has simply landed on the mountain from another planet.”

Franz Gertsch was born March 8, 1930, in Mörigen on Switzerland’s Lake Biel as the one youngster of a father who taught grade faculty and a mom whose household owned a neighborhood restaurant.

Mr. Gertsch dropped out of faculty to pursue portray, taking some courses at a faculty in Bern run by abstract-impressionist painter Max von Mühlenen. After being discharged from necessary Swiss navy service due to a coronary heart ailment, Mr. Gertsch traveled to locations similar to Paris, Scotland and Italy to experiment in varied visible kinds, together with wooden cuts and collages.

In 1969, he completed his first large-scale portray primarily based on {a photograph}, “Huaa…!,” a galloping rider with saber raised from a nonetheless from the 1968 film “The Cost of the Gentle Brigade.”

His 1970 “Portrait of Urs Lüthi” exhibits the topic in a blue blazer and sun shades, sitting subsequent to a digital camera. Critics described it as a contemporary tackle a Dutch nonetheless life. “Medici” in 1971 turned a time capsule for the period — with 5 younger males, their hand flowing and bell bottoms swaying, leaning on a barricade.

He deserted the photo-based type within the mid-Eighties to solely pursue intricate woodcut prints utilizing tiny holes stuffed with pigments. The work, printed on massive sheets of handmade Japanese paper, produced a gauzy impact wherein photos, similar to portraits or crops, float in a monochromic wash of pink, inexperienced or different colours.

Some critics noticed his prints as too antiseptic and scientific. “Gertsch may match with pear wooden and the best handmade papers, however his footage style of metallic,” mentioned a 1990 review in The Washington Publish of 9 prints on the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Backyard. “The making of his portraits is just like the making of machines.”

Mr. Gertsch later returned to photo-based work, together with many depicting landscapes and nature. His four-painting sequence, “The Four Seasons,” confirmed the altering mild and environs over a 12 months on a sloping woodland close to his home and studio in Rüschegg, Switzerland.

His consideration to the unique picture was so exact that the land and leaves closest to the body have been barely blurred to replicate the imperfections in a digital camera’s depth of discipline.

In a 2011 oral history, Mr. Gertsch mentioned his shifting inventive kinds have been made on “intuitive” emotions about the place to go subsequent. “I didn’t do all of that with my head,” he mentioned.

Mr. Gertsch is survived by his spouse of 59 years, Maria Meer, and 5 youngsters.

In 1999, Mr. Gertsch wrote an epilogue to the e-book “Franz Gertsch, Silvia: Chronicle of a Painting” by Norberto Gramaccini and Steven Lindberg. Mr. Gertsch mentioned painters have all the time confronted a crossroads.

“Is portray’s unique objective to seek advice from itself, or wouldn’t it be higher suggested to take care of actuality?” he wrote. “I selected the unconventional approach: actuality as portray.”