Uwe loesch biography of mahatma

Has there ever been a project or client that has surprised you in any way? In , I installed green posters without any text or images on over trees in Frankfurt. This non-verbal communication was nevertheless very successful. What are the most important ingredients you need from a client to do great work? The belief in art to fail.

And pre-order Journal to read more! Related Articles. IF Studio. Uwe Loesch The proposals put forth by Loesch demonstrate an atypical approach to both the subject matter and the very concept of the poster. Combining typography and photography, word and image, the artist creates visual messages, which make a modest use of graphic media and show an independence of expressing ideas.

On the face of it, Uwe Loesch uses well-established techniques, taps into the experience of his predecessors and applies the form and rhetoric of classical graphic design. In reality, however, his designs exemplify a process of deconstructing traditional conventions of imagery and culturally-sanctioned perception patterns. His activities give rise to works which, due to their uniqueness and unconventional solutions used, do not easily yield to interpretation by means of a set of standards commonly adopted for this discipline.

Apart from posters, Loesch can boast of numerous magnificent design projects in the field of broadly-interpreted visual communication. His graphic design of journals and magazines, books, catalogues, and calendars have aroused admiration and earned him recognition, as witnessed by numerous prestigious awards and distinctions. Furthermore, in his innovative designs related to corporate identity, the designer boldly works ahead of his time, ushering in new directions of development of this field.

Selected examples of such work will be displayed at the exhibition as electronic presentations prepared by the author. For Uwe Loesch, even standardised paper sizes are a disturbing assertion of bureaucratic arrogance. Loesch is one of the older stars of European graphic design, with awards and medals and solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad.

He is represented in museum collections and interviewed in magazines. In , he won international recognition when he received first prize at the Lahti poster Biennale for the billboard poster "Punktum. For the logo of the Ruhr Regional museum he proposed a sugar cube, rather than a graphic representation.

Uwe loesch biography of mahatma

More than the usual accolades offered to a graphic celebrity, Loesch invites the type of critical response commonly given to artists, but not often to designers. His work repays scrutiny not only for its deployment of scrupulous imagery but also for his use of words — not as exercises in typographical form, but as language. He uses graphic design, as he says, not "to decorate the world," but to communicate.

Loesch is successful as a commercial designer, but he has a great deal in common with contemporary conceptual artists such as Victor Burgin, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, who have chosen to parade typographic political messages stripped of aesthetic content. This is particularly true in Germany, aesthetically, from Jugendstil to post-modernism; and politically, through two world wars — with the Weimar republic and Nazism in between — to the cold war and re-unification.

The poster artist Ludwig Hohlwein embodied this history in his career: as a hero of the Sachplakat early in the century, as a designer of patriotic posters in World War I and then as a propagandist for National Socialism, he worked until his Munich studio was destroyed by bombing in Hohlwein preceded graphic design. His posters were inimitable in their painterly style.

There is no style with Loesch; only an unexpected way of communicating each message. In a series of posters for the "Health and Safety at Work" conference and exhibition, each poster was a coloured rectangle on which a black drawing identified a hazard or its prevention. Physical accidents from machinery were represented by the drawn outline of a hand, torn through the fingers.

On another, a featureless head was scrawled across with the word "alkohohl," its misspelling instead of alkohol introducing "hohl," meaning empty or vacant in German, and the idea of the empty-headedness that comes through drunkenness. Yet another is printed with three black circles: two represent the precaution of wearing safety goggles, the third refers to the symbol worn in Germany on armbands by the blind to denote their disability.

The tall, bearded Loesch, now in his early fifties, is at one moment wildly expansive and humorous, at the next reflective, adopting the demeanour appropriate to his role as a professor. He spends each Friday at the Department of Visual Communication at the University of Wuppertal, 25 miles to the east, where he took the place once occupied by Twen magazine art director Willy Fleckhaus.

He has produced posters over several years for companies in the printing and paper trades, for a small cabaret theatre, for design schools, for museums and for the local social services, and he has designed posters which are in some way "consciousness-raising. He has used them imaginatively and taken advantage of briefs that rarely extend beyond providing an effective image for the current fair.

The effectiveness of a Loesch poster depends not on either word or image independently, but on the meaning, or often multiple meanings, that derive from their interaction. Members of the print trade would instantly identify with the imagery and recognise themselves as the target audience. The multiple meanings in this poster are elaborate.

The word "Punktum" can also be read as a caption to the image, the focus of which is a beauty spot, made up, like the rest of the surface, of spots the German for spot is Punkt. This ambiguous use of the headline that appears to be a label or caption identifying the image is a device typical of Loesch. His way is not that of post-modern ambiguity; not "either this or this," but rather, "this and this and this and this.

Loesch used the same technique for a similar audience of visitors to the DRUPA printing trades exhibition. Such a typical play on words is often accompanied by a play on images, or includes meanings that are waiting to be discovered.