Under the title "Questioning Reality - Visual Worlds Today", documenta 5 under the direction of Harald Szeemann broke with museum and curatorial conventions. In addition to performances, happenings and art by outsiders, it also included non-artistic visual worlds and mass media.

With this thematic orientation, it provided a stage for the then newly emerging painting of Photorealism for the first time and brought its protagonists to international attention. The Swiss painter Franz Gertsch (1930-2022), who was represented in the Neue Galerie in 1972 alongside US-American painters such as Chuck Close or Don Eddy with his painting "Medici" (dispersion, 400 x 600 cm), which depicts a group of Lucerne bohemians, was undoubtedly one of the best-known European representatives of this current of hyperrealist painting. His paintings - large-dimension blow-ups that he created with the help of slide projections - not only went down in art history, but also made contemporary history.

On 21 December, he died at the age of 92.