Art & Art History
Self/Society
Self/Society documents how four graphic designers express their own strong values through their work, using their various commissions as a medium for personal statements, both social and aesthetic. The featured designers are Paul Davis of the United States, Alain Le Quernec of France, Uwe Loesch of Germany, and David Tartakover of Israel. Each of the designers finds ways to make his posters an extension of his own values, emotions, commitments, concerns, and stylistic preferences. Although each designer is from a different country, they are all similar in age, and they all have a legacy of social concern that they express through their work, including their choice of clients, styles, and technologies, as well as their interpretation of content and various other criteria.
In Self/Society, each of these artists employs a variety of aesthetics and applications within the realm of poster art to demonstrate the vitality of the medium to its fullest. Their works stand in contrast to slick abstract formalist design. All the designers use images and are concerned with the different ways in which these images communicate their statements. Their choices are based on a certain notion of audience—they are not designing for themselves, but rather for a specific audience. Each designer draws on existing images and codes for their statements. They are not preoccupied with style; their work does not display a single stylistic solution. They do not see the poster as high art, but rather as a part of popular culture.
PRESS RELEASE
Self/Society
Paul Davis, Alain Le Quernec, Uwe Loesch, and David TartakoverGallery 400
Chicago, IL
January 10–February 16, 1990
Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 10, 1990, 4–7pm
Four Poster Designers:
Paul Davis/New York, New York
Alain Le Quernec/Plogonnec, France
Uwe Loesch/Düsseldorf, West Germany
David Tartakover/Tel Aviv, Israel
Self/Society documents how four graphic designers express their own strong values through their work, using their various commissions as a medium for personal statements, both social and aesthetic. The featured designers are Paul Davis of the United States, Alain Le Quernec of France, Uwe Loesch of Germany, and David Tartakover of Israel. Each of the designers finds ways to make his posters an extension of his own values, emotions, commitments, concerns, and stylistic preferences. Although each designer is from a different country, they are all similar in age, and they all have a legacy of social concern that they express through their work, including their choice of clients, styles, and technologies, as well as their interpretation of content and various other criteria.
In Self/Society, each of these artists employs a variety of aesthetics and applications within the realm of poster art to demonstrate the vitality of the medium to its fullest. Their works stand in contrast to slick abstract formalist design. All the designers use images and are concerned with the different ways in which these images communicate their statements. Their choices are based on a certain notion of audience—they are not designing for themselves, but rather for a specific audience. Each designer draws on existing images and codes for their statements. They are not preoccupied with style; their work does not display a single stylistic solution. They do not see the poster as high art, but rather as a part of popular culture.
Paul Davis’s career began in 1959 when he joined Push Pin Group. He worked there with Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser. In addition to his work for the Shakespeare Festival, his work has appeared in television commercials, on the cover of Time magazine and in hundreds of other publications. He has claimed, “a lot of people say that you shouldn’t be mixing art and politics. If you’re doing that you’re creating propaganda. But people are always making propaganda.”
Alain Le Quernec is a leading French poster artist who has chosen to devote his mass-communication art to non-commercial purposes. In this can be seen some influence of the Polish poster tradition, which helped mold him during the time he studied in Warsaw. Living since then in the remote northwest of France, he dominates poster art in the region but maintains an international presence through exhibitions. “My work is far from that of the advertising poster. The advertising poster fascinates me in some ways and scares me in many others. Publicity has become such a profession, divided into so many distinct parts and using so many different people from the start of the idea to the final result, that creativity seems to be restricted from the onset—one’s work in that case is already defined before one starts painting it. That is why I chose, once and for all, the cultural and social poster rather than that of the commercial one.”
Uwe Loesch works as a freelance graphic designer and copywriter in almost every communication branch. The spectrum of his clients reaches out to publishing companies to service and industrial enterprises, from state ministries to cultural institutions. Loesch ’s work has a pure feeling for space—a connection to modern simplicity in the Bauhaus tradition and the meditative beauty of Japanese calligraphy. He has created such well-known works as the non-poster series “sign Quotes” and “Mental Leap.” His work has appeared in such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Art, Ein Harod. In 1985, Loesch was appointed a professor at the College for Applied Art in Düsseldorf.
David Tartakover has mastered the skills of the poster and has learned how to approach every aspect rather than to concentrate on some narrow subject or visual style. Tartakover uses the poster as an extraordinary social and artistic document. His work involves cultural, political, and commercial issues. Many of Tartakover’s political posters seek to reflect a collective experience in a country (Israel) that has been besieged by war. Tartakover realizes the impact of the printed image and word and how poignant they are in conveying topical issues. His macabre humor is demonstrated in his use of a coke bottle in an advertisement; yet, upon further examination, it is clear that the bottle is used as a Molotov cocktail.
EXHIBITION SUPPORT
Self/Society is supported by the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Art and Design’s College of Architecture, Art, and Urban Planning.
PRINT COLLATERAL
Postcard: Self/Society
EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
Paul Davis
Ashes, 1977
Poster art, 46 x 23 in.
Henry V, 1976
Poster art, 46 x 30 in.
March for Soviet Jewry, 1984
Poster art, 45 x 29 1/2 in.
Three Penny Opera
Poster art, 84 x 42 in.
Alain Le Quernec
Anywhere/Everywhere, 1987
Poster art, 29 15/16 x 56 in.
Attention, 1987
Poster art, 33 15/16 x 24 in.
Hand & Puppet Theatre, 1987
Poster art, 33 1/8 x 23 1/4 in.
To Be Infirm in Reeducation, 1985
Poster art, 33 15/16 x 24 in.
Undersea Archeology on the Coast of France, 1985
Poster art, 33 1/4 x 23 1/4 in.
Uwe Loesch
EBV-Scan, 1985
Poster art, 39 3/8 x 15 3/4 in.
Eurocom, 1984
Poster art, 33 x 119 cm.
The Kiss of Death, 1985
Poster art, 33 x 46 3/4 in.
Punktum, 1982
Poster art, 33 x 46 3/4 in.
You’ll Never Get That to Fit Again, 1985
Poster art, 33 x 46 3/4 in.
David Tartakover
Ben Quirion, 1979
Poster art, 35 x 22 1/2 in.
Greenberg Cultural Poster, 1984
Poster art, 39 3/8 x 27 1/2 in.
Happy New Year, 1987
Poster art, 39 3/8 x 27 1/2 in.
Polaroid, 1979
Poster art, 39 3/8 x 27 1/2 in.
Who Will Utter the Mighty Acts of Israel, 1982
Poster art, 39 3/8 x 27 1/2 in.
ARTISTS BIOGRAPHIES
Paul Davis (born 1938) is an American graphic artist. He formed the Paul Davis Studio in 1963, working first in New York and later in Sag Harbor on Long Island. His style has had a tremendous impact on the field of illustration. His illustrations have appeared in Life, Time, Playboy, the Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and the New York Times to name just a few. He has served as the art director of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival since 1984. Davis’s other clients include UNITE!, Disney, Lincoln Center, McKinsey & Co. Rolling Stone, Yahoo, Adobe, and A&E Television. His distinctive paintings and posters for advertising, publishing, and entertainment have been the subject of museum and gallery exhibitions throughout Japan and Italy, and in cities around the U.S., including a retrospective at the Philbrook Museum of Art in his native Tulsa. Davis ’s work is included in collections throughout the world, including the poster collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Most recently, in 1987, the Drama Desk created a special award to recognize Davis ’s iconic posters for Joseph Papp ’s Public Theater. He is also a recipient of the coveted AIGA Medal, and of honorary doctorates from School of Visual Arts, New York, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a vice president of their Society of Fellows. Davis attended classes at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now the School of the Visual Arts) in New York.
Alain Le Quernec (born 1944) is a French graphic designer. His work focuses on the production of posters about political, social, and cultural issues. Le Quernec’s first poster was printed in 1962, and his work has since been exhibited at the Museum of Nantes, France; the Museum of Modern Art, Tel Aviv; and the University of Brest, France. Le Quernec is a member of the International Superclub, Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), and he is a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Graphic Design. Currently he is a graphic design professor at Collège Brizeux, Quimper, France, where he lives and works. Le Quernec completed his training at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts under Henryk Tomaszewski.
Uwe Loesch (born 1943) is one of the leading international poster designers. His work is represented in prestigous museums and collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Le Musée de la Publicité, Paris; the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; and the Library of Fine Arts, Berlin. Loesch has held more than thirty solo exhibitions, all of which display his famous minimalist poster design. The numerous awards he has been honored with include the Grand Prix of the International Poster Biennial in Lahti, Finland 1983; one of the first three prizes of the International Invitational Poster Exhibition, Colorado 1987; and Winner of the Internationale Litfass-Art-Biennial, Munich 1989. He is member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), the Type Directors Club of New York, and the Art Directors Club of Germany. As of this year, Loesch holds a professorship for communication design at the University of Wuppertal. He studied graphic design at the Peter-Behrens Academy in Düsseldorf from 1964–68.
David Tartakover (born 1944) is an Israeli graphic designer, political activist, artist, and design educator. Since 1975, he has operated his own studio in Tel Aviv, specializing in various aspects of visual communications, with particular emphasis on culture and politics. Since 1976, Tartakover has been a senior lecturer in the visual communication department of the Bezalel Academy, as well as a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and president of the Graphic Designers Association of Israel (GDAI). Tartakover designed Peace Now’s logo in 1978. The logo emerged from a poster entitled Peace Now by Tartakover for a mass rally, held in what is now Rabin Square in Tel Aviv on April 1, 1978. It became the name of the organization, the first political bumper sticker in Israel, and it is still one of Israel’s most popular stickers. He describes himself as a”local designer.” His work has won numerous awards and prizes and is included in the collections of museums in Europe, U.S., and Japan. Prizes include the 8th Poster Biennale, Lahti, Finland, in 1989 and second prize at the Salon of Photography in Kalish, Poland, in 1990. Tartakover studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, and is a graduate of the London College of Printing.