I spoke with artist Derek Kreckler recently. He collaborated with Bernhard in the late 1970s/early 1980s and he remembers Bernhard was always obsessed with salt, blood and death, and with the Death Camps under the Nazis in Germany during WW2. At art school, Bernhard became famous for nailing dead fish to trees and using rabbits in his actions and installations.

Sachs was committed to an avant-garde that has already failed but nevertheless persists at the heart of practice, in the experimentalism that drives it. Although the western artworld has been contorting itself for almost a hundred years, trying to maintain an ethical and political practice in this field is beyond many. This is why Sachs’ work is significant. He speaks to generations of practitioners trying to establish a voice for an art that matters. An art that has purpose, an art that contributes to the critical ideas of its time. It’s not an easy art. Practice is not easy in Sachs’ school of thinking. It’s a commitment to the socio-political world through its role as witness. Practice is a way of life.

The physical and psychological activity demonstrated through the repetitive reworking of ideas and images to create an archive of over-drawing and re-dating to enable layers of physical history within one work is quite astonishing. Almost breathless in its performativity. Twirling the two-dimensional surface through ecstasy and obliteration until the work becomes extinct and is thrown into the void of its own living history. This is a wild approach. An attempt to archive the practice in the present. To bury and perhaps commemorate its passing.

Bernard’s contribution to the art world is astonishing for its intellectual depth. In many ways, he is a rouge philosopher, pushing his theoretical meanderings through dark installations which dive into the materiality of art – drawing and painting – and its comeuppance in photography, film and reproductive media. For him the photograph was an X-ray and he utilized this idea to demonstrate how history is made and revised; performed and compromised. Explorative X-rays of paintings by curators and conservationists fascinated him. His interest in the ontology and epistemology of history and of various art mediums became conceptual tools to explore through art. But as Janet McKenzie argues:

In spite of the literary critique that dominates most commentary on the work of Bernhard Sachs, and the artist’s own interest in theory, his drawn images are physically beautiful, dramatic and confrontational. Australian born, of German descent, the Germanic tradition of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, inform his worldview. Like Anslem Kiefer, Sachs addresses the physical weight of European culture, particularly the inescapable weight of the German tradition since World War II.¹

Bernhard’s ‘late work’, is analysed in his 2009 exegesis titled APOSTASIS: Latework and Allegory, where he clearly aligns himself with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. An influence that will dominate postmodernism as it repeats history, amidst the shattering of philosophical positions via deconstructive and post-structuralist theory. In this milieu Sachs inserts himself and his history. The son of a German refugee who escaped Germany after the devastation of World War II. The trauma of the father and his father before him, a man, who like many in Weimer Germany renounced his religion and Jewish heritage.¹⁰ Sachs enters this psycho-social miasma and sets to work as an artist to approach this history through poetic means. Apostasies is the renunciation of religion or belief. In medical terminology it refers to the termination of disease. It is tempting to see these ideas played out in the artist’s practice as a psychoanalytic therapy. The son attempting to heal the father’s history.