HIGH-QUALITY ART PRINTS FOR YOUR HOME
ato offers an exquisite selection of high-quality art prints. In collaboration with ato's artists, two limited series have been created to date on the themes of "Humor" and "Struktur". The artists have designed some of the motifs exclusively for the series.
In close consultation, the posters were produced using the offset printing process by the regionally based offset printer Wolfgang Karwatzki. This enables ato to offer high-quality art posters. Discover all the art prints in our online store - ideal for your home or as a gift.
Ten good reasons - the new poster edition from ato
A text by Katarina Schorb
Refreshing, dry, black, subliminal or flat - humor can be so diverse, the theme of ato's new poster edition. The contributions of the ten participating artists reflect the different types of humor and pose the question of whether and why there is still a reason to laugh today.
Sibylle Wagner addresses the feeling of helplessness and overwhelm in the face of a seemingly never-ending flood of bad news and crises. The poster shows terms written in pencil that span the entire spectrum of negative news, from the end of the world, the destruction of nature and xenophobia to stress, fear and disrespect. At the bottom is a small figure with raised hands, whose childlike exclamation of disapproval "Och Menno!" [Oh my!] contrasts with the gravity of the negative news. This breaks the seriousness of the motif, but at the same time Sibylle Wagner also makes us aware that rejecting bad news is futile. In this way, the break created by humor helps us to escape the feeling of overwhelming heaviness and thus become capable of acting again.
For Maike Denker, humor is also a means of combating the prevailing feeling of powerlessness. In her poster, she shows an arrangement of tree leaves in the style of a display board. All the leaves have circular cut-outs, which are characteristic of the leafcutter bee, one of the 560 species of wild bees native to our country. The leafcutter bee uses these confetti-like circles of leaves for breeding. In the poster, however, we do not see this animal "Konfetti" - which for us humans stands for exuberant joy and celebration - just as the leafcutter bee may soon no longer be visible. Like around half of all wild bee species, it is threatened with extinction. Nevertheless, the poster gives cause for hope in a humorous way: Maike Denker not only draws attention to species conservation, but also describes the work as a co-production in which the collaboration between humans and animals leads to something new.
Animals also play a role in the posters by Axel Philipp, Daniele Dell'Eva and Nemanja Sarbajic. At first glance, Axel Philipp's motif is reminiscent of a bird's or Easter nest with four eggs. But at second glance, it becomes clear that something is not quite right here. The four egg-shaped elements are fused together. Has nature made a mistake here? Or are we witnessing an evolutionary process, another form of AI, animal intelligence?
The cheerfulness that the colors and shapes found in nature can convey to us is also the motif in Daniele Dell'Eva's poster. A parrot forms the main motif, but the lively-looking bird turns out to be a decorative flower vase. In "The Look of Love", Nemanja Sarbajic's poster shows a large plush panda bear surrounded by other plush animals sitting opposite us as if ready for a conversation.
Stephanie Senge, Natascha Schoenaich, Desirée Eppele and Gin Bahc deal with socio-political issues. In her pencil drawing, Stephanie Senge shows us a female figure in a flared dress who is described as a "happily enraptured female suffragette" [„glücklich verzückte Frauen-Suffragette“]. Suffragettes were women's rights activists in the 19th/20th century who campaigned for women's suffrage through resistance actions such as hunger strikes. The tautological exaggeration (happy and enraptured) together with the cartoon-like depiction of the dancing suffragette contradicts the significant struggle of the historical women's movement. At the same time, Senge alludes here to the theme of consumption and its promise of happiness, a central theme in her artistic work. During an action in London in 1912, the suffragettes smashed store windows with stones to draw attention to the importance of women in public life as "purchasing power" and voters. This poster also reveals a humorous contradiction, which leads us to the question of our attitude towards consumption today: "Happily rapturously enraptured?"
Natascha Schoenaich, on the other hand, works with the medium of exaggeration. Her poster also shows a woman, but almost only her naked upper body is visible. This is covered with a multitude of breasts. For Schoenaich, this figure is "a person who can give and nourish almost without limit", but who is also seen as "abnormal". It is a tragic-comic figure, "erotic-comic, monstrous-comic", according to Schoenaich.
Gin Bahc also deals with sexuality. In the foreground of her poster, two toy figures can be seen in the middle of a bag of fries, arranged in a blow job. Behind the figures, we see a hand squeezing ketchup out of a bag that is dripping onto an upright French fry that is already soaked in ketchup - "Food Porn" in the literal sense. The quick satisfaction of needs, through fast food or a quickie, is ironically demonstrated here by Gin Bahc.
The splotches, streaks and drips of color in Desirée Eppele's painting are also reminiscent of bodily fluids. The picture support is a collection of cardboard boxes that protrude three-dimensionally into the room. However, the picture extends beyond the support and onto the wall, where the title "Schinkendes Siff" can be read. The play on words, in which the initial letters have been reversed, corresponds with the painting style and the material and evokes associations with dirt and disgust. However, the "sinking ship" is traditionally a motif that symbolizes a sinking society. In Eppele's work, too, the play on words creates humor and breaks with the seriousness of the subject.
With Kilian Kretschmer, it is the context that creates the joke. His poster motif is a photograph of a switched-off television screen. Hung up in the living room, it is immediately clear what it is and the poster becomes a 'flat' joke in the literal sense. But it's not quite that simple, because the switched-off screen shows a reflection in the photograph. The poster becomes a projection surface, a screen that invites us to search for meaning and at the same time thematizes seeing itself. The television, which actually projects images, itself becomes an image that contains an image. The multiple duplications become a game with mirrors. Or is the whole thing just a "fake"? The best jokes give us food for thought.
In view of the new poster edition, the question formulated at the beginning, whether and why there is still a reason to laugh today, arises in a different way. The posters show that precisely because there are so many crises today and the shortcomings of life seem so great, we should show humor. Because humor - in whatever form - is an expression of an attitude of resistance, breaks with seriousness and thus gives hope.
Humoristic art prints
The edition on the theme of "Humor" consists of ten high-quality art prints in A1 size, which can be purchased in the ato store. Why the theme "Humor"? Why not? Where would we be without humor?
Art prints - "Struktur" edition
On the occasion of the ten-week art and science festival "WERKstattPALAST", 21 ato artists submitted motifs on the subject of structure. The high-quality offset prints are DIN A1 in size. The complete "Struktur" edition is available in our ato shop.
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