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The artist Herwig Tollschein engages deliberately with letters and with the

words developed from them, which he either coins himself or transfers from the world of advertising, and in his visual realisation he emphasises their deep-reaching signal quality. Tollschein’s oeuvre is rooted in the world of lines. With these means he depicts recognisable architecture, vehicles and power stations – predominantly masculine, in part military and martial signals. The cars, rockets, tanks, trains, ships and fighter aircraft speak not only of the results of an ever more highly developed technology, its aesthetics and the fastest possibilities of mobility, but at the same time of the hidden Oedipal problems of our society. Into this world he draws letters by way of contrast, and joins them together with obvious playfulness – half hidden, both meaningful and meaningless. In his imaginative landscapes of line, a symbiosis between script and image grows.

As a reaction to these technoid, masculine works, feminine themes have been at the forefront of his artistic interest since 2003. His more recent prints are creatures of advertising graphics: posters, magazine covers and the like give the artist the opportunity to engage with the glossy aesthetic and the eroticism compulsively bound up with it. The “visual violence” of the media that shape society, conveying values in this way, is the starting point for a pictorial recoding and reinterpretation. By fusing printing blocks, he creates ingenious multiplications of content.

In his most recent works he attempts to unite these thematically and technically very different bodies of work. In the new synthesis, drawn imaginary urban architecture, vehicles and war machines appear alongside predominantly printed female figures with fragments of text. The result, in both medium and content, is a compressed, complex image in which the two poles he had until now kept so strictly apart come together as a whole.