Climbing the many steps up to Uwe Loesch's studio, the lines from the "Tower Keeper" come to mind: "Born to see, destined to observe, sworn to the tower, I like the world." Words from that poet, whose name Loesch intentionally and playfully misspelled on a greeting card in the anniversary year 1999: "GOEHTE." The poster designer Uwe Loesch has settled in Erkrath near Düsseldorf. In the tower of a former paper factory, he looks at the world from above. His studio seems custom-made for him and his work: spacious and airy, with a bold use of open space, with a good perspective outwards. On the windowsill, a collection of various awards from around the world; next to it, casually leaned against the wall, framed awards from the "Art Directors Club": "You could hang them up, but you shouldn’t."
But who is this Loesch actually? Simply put, he’s the one with the black and the white shoe. But that doesn’t quite capture it. Loesch is a world-renowned poster designer, showered with awards, celebrated in the scene, a pioneer of visual provocation. In addition, he was a professor of visual communication and an international figurehead of the University of Wuppertal. Officially, his biography reads: born in 1943 in Dresden, he fled to the West in 1958 and has lived in Düsseldorf ever since. From 1964 to 1968, he studied graphic design at the Peter Behrens School of Arts, then worked in his own studio for industry, publishing houses, and cultural institutions. In 1985, he was appointed to the FH Düsseldorf as a professor for visual communication. From 1990, he was poached by the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and taught there succeeding Willy Fleckhaus. Since the early 1980s, his poster designs have gained international attention; in 1984, some posters were not only included in the collection but also in the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art New York. Loesch cannot be pinned down to any one style; rather, he embodies a way of thinking. His poster designs are never predictable; although he has his famous stock of preferred fonts and colors, he continues to surprise.
This is how Loesch destroyed his original poster design for the "41st German Historians' Day 1996" with a paper shredder, in order to photograph the rest and rhythmically arrange further texts on it: "History as an Argument," this being the title of this typographical field of ruins. Loesch's designs are rarely obvious. He calls it "leaving things open as a principle," and that one should "not shape things as a mourning of completion, but rather allow space for one's own interpretations." The playful element is noticeable in his designs every second – experimenting with blurriness, neon colors often cause eye pain, and Loesch's love for wordplay is often palpable. His poster for a lithography company claimed in 1990: "Blueberries are red when they are green." In the meantime, Loesch is dealing with "gold as an ironic break, green as the color of the prophet, and red as the yellow peril."
Ironic break – this principle also applies to Loesch's footwear. In the meantime, his shoes have become his trademark. He himself describes this optical nonsense as "a form of self-irony, a form of exaggeration, and thus clearly kitsch." This shows that design is always also a question of mentality for him. He calls this "the principle of optical disappointment" – meaning that text and image are positioned where one expects it the least, often off to the side. Or he layers image and text elements on top of each other until they are illegible. This stylistic principle can also be found in his designs for the Düsseldorf cabaret stage "Kom(m)ödchen." On the program poster "Last Call: Migration of Peoples," he swirled the typography down the drain in 1991.
Despite his penchant for "visual puns," he also creates serious posters. For his Hiroshima poster, he does not need shocking motifs to grab the viewer's heart and mind. The Americans had named their atomic bomb "Little Boy." On Loesch's poster, a naked Asian boy is depicted; at chest height, one reads in quotation marks "Little Boy," followed by a space and then a dash. This typographic abyss makes further words unnecessary.
In the meantime, Loesch has retired from university operations due to age, but retirement is not on his mind. Alongside many other projects, he is planning a book about dog ears, "the bourgeois crimes against fiction, which, as a design principle, represent a very beautiful irritation." For his many contributions, especially in poster design, he received the German Design Award for his lifetime achievement in 2013, a prestigious award in the graphics scene. Loesch, who joyfully accepted the award, is said in the jury's reasoning to be "the first German graphic designer to dissolve the boundaries between art and design, between politics and comedy, and perhaps even those between left and right."
