His (Bernhard’s) meditative art seems to call us to realise something essential about all art; that everything is of significance, nothing is incidental, yet all is ultimately unknown.
—Anna Clabburn, 1997¹

The neo-expressionist movement—and the transavantgarde—that became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s had its epicentre in Europe and in particular Germany. Amongst many practitioners of the time—Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Jörg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz, A.R. Penck, and others—were engaged with an apparent fury of massive and mannered figuration addressing history, mythology, philosophy, the subconscious and, significantly, guilt. My own comprehension of this internationally influential movement was that children born during and after the Nazi generation had come of age and were confronting that catastrophe with all its madness and horror. One might draw some parallel with the redress of the colonial expansionism of previous centuries that is playing out in considerations of indigenous cultures and their destruction and survival.

Bernhard had a Germanic name and his father was a migrant from war ravaged Germany. The zeitgeist, mood and the spirit of this period—to some extent running parallel to punk music—contributed to the emergence of several artists within Australian culture of the 1970s and 1980s. These artists developed and sustained an art of tenebrous, layered depth. On second thoughts my alignment of punk music and art is faulty in this context. The punk attitude is defined by swift, raw simplicity, and artists such as Bernhard presented sustained, sophisticated complexity. I would consider that he retained a quality eschewed by many of his contemporaries in the new wave and within modernism; Bernhard was nostalgic, maybe not sentimental, but he was nostalgic.

The tormented palimpsest that his characteristic works possess, the ‘scorched-earth’ surfaces of the majority of his works appear to search through the archaeology of his inheritance—actual, imagined and desired—for spiritual authenticity. Bernhard was not a modernist, and although he possessed humour and a sense of irony, he was not cynical enough to be a card-carrying post-modernist. Bernhard was, I dare to say, a traditionalist, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Having said that I think if he had been born into the grandeur of sixteenth century Baroque he would have yearned to be a medievalist. Bernhard’s work is abundant with the residue of abandoned culture, when his modernist contemporaries threw the ‘baby’ out, Bernhard kept the ‘bathwater’. Religion has left the room and left the culture but the Veil of Veronica and the Shroud of Turin persist like ghosts in the erasure of Bernhard's murals.

Regarding Process

My remarks regarding Bernhard’s process are from memory, not from retrospective research, so some discrepancies may occur. When I first saw Bernhard’s work in the mid-eighties (84/85) it was characteristically cinematic in reach, virtually the scale of a panoramic movie screen; the black and white imagery often shifting in focus from clarity to blur was itself filmic. Indeed, seen amid the chromatic expressionists of the Roar artists in downtown Fitzroy the shock impact was akin to viewing black and white newsreel footage of death camps after the technicolour cartoons of Pop and jazzy abstraction.

Bernhard's drawings were wall scaled, usually horizontal in orientation. He was drawing with vast passages of charcoal on Stonehenge paper. Stonehenge was strong, archival and was, I recall, hot pressed (smooth) and cold white (not ivory). Bernhard’s blacks, I am sure, were intensified with black pastel (charcoal does not permit dense black).

The distinctive edges were the strappings of masking tape that had adhered the works to the studio walls. These adhesives were now folded forward to reinforce the edge physically and visually appeared like a checkerboard edge that also had the effect of looking like sprockets on a strip of negatives or film footage.

Subsequent to this process, and no doubt inspired by X-rays of museum masterpieces under restoration, Bernhard intensified the secondary aspect of visual layering to include the nails that pinned a canvas to the stretcher. The works became radiographic versions of themselves. In most instances the imagery was appropriated from amongst others; Caravaggio, El Greco, anonymous masters and the gritty photographic reportage from previous generations.Documentary text appeared as an additional bordering device including dates of creation and of modification and titles with near impenetrable meanings.

In the passage of time the works were re-visited and further tormented, bitumen intensified surface and shellac glistened like ageing parchment, and the layering of various masking and packing tapes on the borders of many works created an aspect suggesting that the work was akin to an archaeological site. An exhumation of itself.

Bernhard Sachs: Personal remarks 

For much of our careers Bernhard and I shared a profoundly intense relationship with several conspicuous elements. These being: drawing, figuration, grandeur of scale, ruination, the classical (but not the neo-classical), a preference for the monochromatic, and the severity of black and white with occasional fugitive muted colours. Our work often shares a sense of enigma and melancholy.

Bernhard was enigmatic and I would dare to say he had the melancholia of the existentialist. He was mysterious and difficult to comprehend, but I suspect that he also found himself difficult and elusive because he contemplated both the darkness and the void. In this he was courageous. My drawing in the memorial exhibition at Linden is not a portrait of Bernhard, but it touches on the fleeting nihilism of one unsatisfied by distraction, décor and entertainment.

Throughout the 1980s I was based in a studio on Smith St Collingwood, Melbourne, and I saw Bernhard's work in several venues in that locale, in particular at Reconnaissance Gallery in Fitzroy. I had been exhibiting in Melbourne with Stuart Gerstman Gallery since 1976, my own work was already over life sized figuration, dark and intense, so I responded to Bernhard’s work with a sense of kinship.

In the late 1980s I taught drawing and painting at the Victorian College of the Arts and I met Bernhard as a staff member at that time, as I recall Lewis Miller introduced us to each other. There was some commonality in the room.

I observed that Bernhard’s sweeping panoramic works often had a divergent compositional complexity whereas my similarly large works had a convergent centralised compositional symmetry. On the basis of these dissimilar qualities we discussed a collaboration in which we each make a vast work, he with a void central space and I make a work with a central icon within an emptiness. The intention being then to swap the works and fill the void within each others work. We referred to the idea several times over the years, but neither fulfilled nor initiated the project. It may have been a folly to have collaborated, but I regret that we did not follow through. 

Might I say, Bernhard was a giant of an artist and the best of his work is utterly majestic.

This article is a transcript of a talk given at the Bernhard Sachs: After History Symposium (2025). Bradbeer's conversational tone has been kept in tact with only minor editorial amendments.