Hans Ticha

Whatever Hans Ticha painted, he captured its essence. Born 1940, he studied with Kurt Robbel and Arno Mohr at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee. He developed a style that is provocative and ironic, figurative and yet abstracted as into a template. Everything in the image is mercilessly stylized, so up-close that an alienating effect creeps in. Ticha was one of the GDR’s most singular Pop-Art satirists, someone who packed his pictures full of keen insights into his time. The Stasi always held him in suspicion: he lived dangerously. Only friends ever saw his acerbic art; and none of them betrayed him. Formally, the ironic pictures he created up through the fall of the Wall in 1989 recall the Pop-Art of the West. But their substance was profoundly different: Ticha provocatively glued the betrayed ideals and lying rituals of the “Winners of History” onto paper or canvas with brush and silkscreen templates, very much in the style of Agit-Prop. Just look at his opportunistically clapping Claqueuer (The Rent-a-Mob), his Alles-Hörer (Ubiquitous Ears) with their giant ears, the rubber-stamping Bürokraten (Bureaucrats) his fat, self-satisfied functionaries; and the list goes on: Agitatoren (Agitators), Ordensträger (Members of the Order), Fahnenschwenker (Flag-wavers). All these form a part of the strange, hard-to-grasp iconography of Ticha’s work, distilled as it were from the constructivism of the Russian Kazimir Malevich, with his Lubok figures, or of the French Fernand Léger, from the stylized, Bauhaus figures of Oskar Schlemmer, and from American Pop-Art into an idiosyncratic cosmos of images. Everything served to construct a grandiose persiflage of the ritualized, stereotype-perpetuating cult of winners dictated by those in power, such as prevailed in the GDR sport-culture of that era – and such as prevails today, too, in the conduct of those shaping international sport competitions, where the ruthless and environmentally devastating reign of money dictates its law of ever higher, ever farther, ever faster – and achieves it by any and all means, not barring doping. 

With his spirit of caustic irony, Hans Ticha fits into nobody’s schema. His eye, his feeling for the times in which he has lived manifests itself in every one of his pictures, whether its subject is the naturally full-breasted girl scout of the East German FDJ (official GDR Youth Organization) or the model for a contemporary advertisement, with her lips and bosom swollen with silicone. In the year of German reunification, 1990, Ticha moved from Berlin to Hochstadt in the Hessian Rhein-Main region. But living in the West did not cure him of his penchant for irony. Even today, his coolly stylized pictures bear titles like: Schöner wohnen (A Nicer Flat), Wir bieten Ihnen ... (We offer you … ), Pauschalreise (All-inclusive Tour), Idol, or Live Sex. Now as ever, his work sarcastically paraphrases the slogans of the yes-man, the opportunist, the hawker of soul and happiness.

text: Ingeborg Ruthe, translation: Darrell Wilkins