Hans Ticha
German Ballet, 1984

Artist
Hans Ticha

Title
German Ballet

Year of creation
1984

Technique and dimensions
oil on canvas, 170 x 201 cm

Year of acquisition
2014

Hans Ticha (born 1940 in Tetschen-Bodenbach) was best known in the GDR as a commercial artist and book illustrator. He was also successful as a painter, and two of his paintings from 1966 and 1975 entered the collection of the National Gallery in East Berlin in 1982. Based on classical modern artists such as Fernand Léger, Ticha developed a striking style whose pictogram-like motifs and bright color areas corresponded to Western Pop Art, although Ticha was not familiar with it at the time. His motifs from the world of sports were particularly popular, but Ticha also painted political pictures, which he kept under lock and key in his studio. In this way, a secret work was created that only slowly became public after the end of the GDR.

Ticha took his motives from the newspapers. He collected reports on political events such as party conferences or military parades and used the images as starting points for his own images. The depiction of people as a series of similar figures with tiny heads without an individual profile formulated a clear criticism of the socialist system. In 1984, Ticha called his rendition of three soldiers of the National People's Army, who march out of the picture in a Prussian goose step and seem to bulldoze everything down, as a "German ballet". The cool metallic shine caused by the fine shades is reminiscent of the paintings of Konrad Klapheck, who criticized power mechanisms in West Germany in a similar way.

The use of dots in "LISMUS" (1983) is reminiscent of Sigmar Polke's grid images, but Ticha developed this representation independently to make it clear that the individual had to be part of the system. The black dots are contrasted by the red propaganda area, whose cropped lettering certainly meant "SOCIALISM", but in its fragmentary nature it can also be added to "REALISM" or "SURREALISM". In this way a subversive ambiguity is created. Ticha showed an alternative to the political system of the GDR as early as 1967, when he looked at the "Friedrichswerder Church" from the roof of the Altes Museum and in the background included the high-rise building in the background that the publisher Axel Springer had built in the western part of Berlin directly on the had the wall built.

Dieter Scholz