Hans Ticha – Monster smile

CHRISTOPH Hein is the bad and beautiful sentence: »The tougher climate produces the more beautiful flowers. That does not speak for the tougher climate, art is a strange plant. «How strange, that can be seen in the pictures of Hans Ticha. He was probably the only pop artist of the GDR, but one of bottomless realism. He ironically countered the concept of agitprop in the GDR with his “agit pop”. What provokes him the most-yesterday as today-are the high callers, the ordered jubers, the beautiful speakers in front of their respective gentlemen. There becomes a grimace from the face, or an empty surface, every laughter can shudder here.

Ticha was and is an avowed outsider. No one who marches somewhere. The perfect facade always lies, he knows, and whoever plays along in the end is no longer able to distinguish truth and lie. Where is the child who dares to call new clothes as in “the emperor”: “But he’s naked!” This child is Ticha. His pictures always call loudly and come across deaf ears. They are icons of contradiction. One could also speak of that farce in which Lauter monsters appear, which are made of ideology, greed and power interest. However, from his sports or leisure pictures that are often disguised with harmlessness. They come over us as a nightmare, as he breaks out of a peaceful summer day with destructive militan.

Tichas picture sujets are popular, so much that it is irritated, then disturbed that there is an evil spirit in them, which makes a dark line through every light appearance. The demons lurk behind it. These are always present for Ticha when he looks at the GDR. But they also gave them out above their end.

The offside was on from birth, on September 2, 1940 in Tetschen-Bodenbach, as a load on his shoulders, which he decided to take easily. The province let Ticha see the shell of the metropolises more clearly. After graduating from high school in Schkeuditz, studying pedagogy followed in Leipzig, then came to Lindenthal near Leipzig as a teacher. Now it got too much in the province. In 1965 he began studying at the Weißensee University of Applied Sciences and lived as a painter and book graphic artist from 1970. Painting did not feed him, and for luck there was the book graphic flowering in the GDR. Publishers quickly recognized his talent to take the image expression to the top without being caricature. It was always icons of the absurd.

A much searched highlight was Karel Čapek’s novel “The War with the Molches” from 1936, which was illustrated by Ticha in 1987 by Ticha. What fuses here, sometimes collaged with photo material, sometimes as a game with letters and numbers, gives the whole thing about a jungle in which dangerous predators lurk. Ticha assembles the pictures pop -up, as if it were about advertising for a new detergent. But that’s conscious misleading.

Always new lines that want to be exceeded – and with it left – does that not have a sporty character? For Hans Ticha. It is based on the eastern and western modernity of the 1920s. El Lissitzky’s Rosta window meet Donald Duck and that in the early 1970s in the GDR! An explosive mix.

Ticha takes the work for publishers as a challenge, looking for new technical possibilities. His image creations are that of a modern alchemist: “I had drawn each of the colors in black on a film, double -copied them on film and processed the films.” This is how his pictograms are created. Art is not a secret script, but for the viewer a search movement for new forms of expression. The strange sometimes.

There are two irony. Hegel’s irony of the world spirit comes from above, the romantic, which becomes the self -defense of the individual against an overwhelming outside world, from below. According to his original impulse, Ticha is also one of these romantics, in whom every laugh contains crying over the hopeless conditions.

It was also a, now bitter, irony for Ticha that he, the outsider, was thrown into a pot after 1990 with the representatives of the GDR art business: with a though intentions. The exhibition “Rising and Fall of Modernity” from 1999 in Weimar made him believe in the new search by the ghosts that the sleep of reason at Goya produces. Ticha reacts indignantly: »These western exhibition organizers, already active in the Eastern countries for a long time, felt called to organize a review for defamation purposes for the first time since the exhibition. That was a ‘look back’ on the GDR painting, shown in a rotted Nazi building, in close proximity and assignment to the Nazi art, the selection without criteria (the ›exhibition organizer‹ had 500 pieces of GDR), ramschy hanging in urgent tightness on a folded garbage film and all of this in a huge, hardly illuminated hall. An event. “

Ticha is also mocked in this exhibition. Do you not see red flags and officials at your pictures at mass events, soldiers in the prickly step, concentrated fists and the same faces? A clear case of agitation! Not only Ticha wondered whether these exhibitors were already born blindly. But as always, you only see what you already know. The GDR officials were terrified of being ironic. Imitated in their bombastic phrases, the hollow self -staging of power. But now the astonishing, the extremely fatal: in the West you obviously didn’t understand this form of irony. Here you say what you think is clear or just as clear. Isn’t that commendable? Maybe for everyday life, but not for art.

The artificially sophisticated in between not only had to experience Ticha, many in the West, who have never learned to read “between the lines”. But Ticha would not be Ticha if he did not take it as a fabric for new pictures.