Biography

My name is Philipp Gurtner. Im 34 years old. Im a neuropsychologist by day and an artist by night. For me, art was always longing for home - a feeling associated with experiental insecurity as I knew it. So art began to be my home - a way to express my feelings - to feel in love. This art as a longing for a home became my passion. Admiring beautiful things was always at its core dimension. So more and more I surpassed drawing monochromatic landscapes by its more powerful colourful extension, acrylic and oil paintings. I studied photographs of landscapes as a reference to repaint them photorealistically, learned how to photograph to generate my own references. The perceptual peace of nature also draw me in early on in my life and I felt in love seeing the exact landscape paintings at my grandmas home in oil. Lately, I'm fascinated by the astonishing perfectionists in hyperrealism. They are not merely coping photographs, not at all, they are proving an incredible understanding of tonal values, hues and lights, producing masterpieces, looking like photographs themselves. But they are not. They are paintings. This fascination combined with my neurotic perfectionism finding a way of healthy expression of social meaning, got me into hyperrealistic portrait painting. And contrary to photographs, although looking like one, they have an innate and idiosyncratic character, carrying the very soul of the painter. And this is what I want to do the rest of my life.