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Biography

My name is Philipp Gurtner.
For me, art was always longing for home - a feeling associated with experiential 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 with its more powerful colorful extension, acrylic and oil paintings. I studied photographs of landscapes as a reference to repaint them photorealistically and learned how to photograph them to generate my references. The perceptual peace of nature also drew me in early on in my life and I fell in love seeing the exact landscape paintings at my grandma's home in oil. Lately, I've been fascinated by the astonishing perfectionists in hyperrealism. They are not merely copying photographs, not at all, they are providing an incredible understanding of tonal values, hues, and lights, producing masterpieces, that look like photographs themselves. But they are not. They are paintings. This fascination combined with my neurotic perfectionism to find 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 for the rest of my life.

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