"Painted Cities" Solo show (Main Entrance right)
and Bag Art Project with  the Dept.of Education of the Museum

Paris – London – New York – Hong Kong …

Thitz brings together the great metropolises of the world in his new series of "Painted Cities". It is not difficult to find one's way in Thitz's world, for each city is identified by an easily recognisable and typical feature: the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Sydney's famous opera house or Hong Kong's glaring billboards …. The artist plays with the recollections and clichés that are so much a part of our visual memories – even for places we have never visited. But the pleasure of recognition is quickly replaced by irritation, for what we see is not quite the world we know. Thitz's fantasy has been to work, adding a house here, a new and extravagant roof there. Paper bags, people, blobs of colour and works of art drift over the cities; the shadows of the entrance to the Panthéon in Paris have their own secretive life … The cities only pretend to be the ones we know. What Thitz has really done is to create a new world, his own world, the Thitz World – a cosmos full of wonder and magic.

His cities are modern beauties: large, noisy, glaring, dynamic and pulsating, packed full of colourful skyscrapers, overrun with cars, people, iridescent shop windows and advertising posters. It is not the actual cityscape that interests Thitz, rather it is the sense of the city – the desire to capture the impressions that bombard us in Paris or London, to recount what makes each attractive and simultaneously demanding and arduous.

"If one really wants to paint large cities, one cannot depict a fictive city but must instead try to paint the experience itself, with all the noises, the racket, the dust and the smells. One second in a city is a mine of information – this city is for me my inner vision – the pictures of this exhibition."

Thitz's earlier cityscapes evolved from photographs: large-scale reproductions were transformed into new cities using collages or over-painting. There his use of artistic means to manipulate reality was particularly evident. For the present series in the exhibition in Karlsruhe Thitz no longer uses the technique of over-painting, and though reality remains his point of departure, it is now far more strongly subjugated to his artistic will. This newly won freedom opens up even greater possibilities of experimenting with perspective and composition and allows him to infuse his images with new vitality and pictorial depth. But his way of painting has also changed. Thitz revives the watercolour technique of his earlier works and builds up his images using layer after layer of transparent and fluid colour. This gives the ink drawings that extend over the entire surface a lively if somewhat nervous character, and while these drawings give greater definition to forms and motifs, they do not actually create an unbroken outline. Webs of fine lines grow out of tiny details, drawing us into the furthermost corners of the pictures.

Continuing the ideal of the "artist-as-creator", Thitz populates his newly created world with creatures of his own making. The sea of dead houses and blocks of skyscraper are, in the true sense of the word, "re-animated". Witty, colourful figures scurry along streets, peep out of windows, or wave to one another – and to the viewer. They are an inseparable part of the city; indeed some figures appear to form a homogeneous unit with the facades of the houses they live in or blend into the tarmac of the crowded streets. Others have become giants, extending their spidery arms along streets or embracing entire skyscrapers. These enormous people provide homes for other, smaller people; for after all – as Thitz explains – there must be something useful about being so big!

With just a few strokes Thitz creates figures that are curiously devoid of individuality, and deliberately so, for they are intended to fuel our imagination. It is the viewer who brings them to life by associating the painted faces and encounters with his or her own acquaintances and personal experiences. But just like in real life, there are also cracks in this cheerful world. Not everyone is part of the hustle and bustle; some are sad and full of longing, as if imprisoned in the vast houses, condemned to solitude, and left to observe the interesting lives of those in the outside world. The darker side of the asphalt jungle is also part of the Thitz World.

His works nevertheless remains cheerful and full of positive energy. Teeming city life remains for Thitz the "most important fuel for fantasy".  For only those who observe closely the streets and squares of cities discover the "secret things", the secret life hidden behind our visible world … To reveal this secret is one of Thitz's aims – and indeed his images do influence our perception! Those who have engaged intensively with his art find it difficult to look at a cityscape or even sit in a sidewalk cafe without looking for Thitz-figures at the next street corner or behind the window across the street or even in some shape on the tarmac … Thitz himself described this enrichment of our normal visual practice as follows:

"One first of all recognises the city and the figures – after which comes the most important thing: Discovery! Just like in a real city we can let our eyes wander, focus on details. There are innumerable secrets hidden in the images. Without even meaning to we begin to look for them. […] It gives me great enjoyment to hid things so well that even after a year one can still find something to laugh about or reflect on. A discovery which we ourselves make has a greater impact than any calculated reference or explanation. Perhaps this does indeed lead to the discovery of small secrets in "real" streets – and with it happiness at such an unexpected gift".

It was Lucy, his daughter, who opened Thitz's eyes for such "small things". With a child at his side, the artist was suddenly allowed to devote himself to this new view of the world. This is why her birth is mentioned in all his biographies and she herself is part of his pictorial world, as indeed is his wife Katharina Trost. That we are really dealing with personal fantasies is confirmed by the many self portraits in his pictures. Again and again he is to be found among "his people", strolling, with one red and one yellow shoe, through the streets or is seen, complete with brush and palette, adding the finishing touches to the painting in which he appears.

And so his cityscapes tell of his own journeys. His travels led him in the last few years to such places as Morocco, Iceland, Italy, and Turkey, to Norway, Sweden, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, India, Nepal and to South Africa. Here Thitz's desire to trace the roots of his own art is evident: for artists have always travelled, be it to see the works of the ancient world, to experience new stimuli through contact with non-European civilisations, or to simply search for solitude and release in untouched nature.

Such journeys are certainly a source of inspiration for Thitz. Testimony to his encounters with the unfamiliar are the many watercolours he executed on his travels. However he is what one might call a "traveller of the twenty-first century". We live in a time in which travelling has become an everyday thing. It is nothing to fly to a beach party in Majorca or to an exhibition in New York. "The world draws closer together" – this understanding of modern society is one of the themes in Thitz's work – and it is by no means unusual in his world to travel by taxi from New York to London …

Thitz's social ideals are closely interwoven with the technical possibilities of our time. Travelling means communication and social exchange with people, a dialogue with different cultures. He uses the commotion of large cities to convey to us, his viewers, his peaceful and, in particular, his communicative version of a global world. Brown, red, green or blue people, some very small, others gigantic, others still sprouting leaves … live together in harmony and peace. Their large eyes reveal curiosity and interest in the other inhabitants of the city. Continually searching for contact, they invitingly and demandingly stretch out their long arms to the person opposite. Then there are Medusa-like figures with six or more arms and hands growing out of their heads; it is as if with their thoughts and creativity they could influence events in the city.

Thitz uses the artistic means of his painting to capture the specifics of these social ideals: his images are lively, colourfully shrill and cheerful; they are friendly invitations to look. The inhabitants of Thitz's cities have their origins in the world of comics, a medium of the ever-present pop culture and one which, being entertaining, funny, and easily understood, is at once familiar to the viewer with absolutely no experience of art. Ubiquitous lines of text and commentaries also provide initial encouragement to engage with the image. Thitz has abolished all barriers that require knowledge of art theory or art history; he makes it easy for us to begin communicating with him.

Bag Art

Thitz, the bag artist – Thitz and the bag. Over the last few years an inseparable couple. His new city images are in essence also collages – collages made up of reality and fiction. Reality is represented not only through photographs but also by the paper bags themselves.

A bag is first and foremost a trite practical object of everyday life. But here it is also a cultural object. The colourful images and often terse text on such bags reveal something of the culture in which they originated – about their owners and their social status and interests, or about their possible contents. The bag is a product of modern mass production, a symbol but also a tool of consumerism – a 'walking' advertisement and a fashionable accessory. The bag has become a modern means of communication and thus fits wonderfully in the Thitz World: as something carried in foreign places, it tells of far countries and cultures.

Thitz packs the beginning of his bag story in a nice anecdote, one that also began with a journey. In India a vegetable seller gave him some of her paper bags so that the young artist at least had something to draw on – it was a gesture that immediately challenged his creativity. That was the start of the painted bags. Thitz sees the original message of the carrier bag as a question and a challenge, and therefore something which requires an artistic answer – one that is sometimes ironic, sometimes an acerbic commentary; and sometimes this creative source disappears completely beneath a new picture.

Thitz always brings bags back from his travels. Such bags are stored in his atelier, filed according to country and continent. Just like a souvenir, he brings home a bag as a piece of the reality of a strange place, which can then be incorporated into a painting. In this way tiny snips of actual cities are included in his paintings. By painting over the fragments of images and texts on such bags, Thitz – with a certain degree of deadpan irony – adds his own, often bizarre, comments. Here too the artist plays with our perception: his aim is to heighten awareness of the colourful world of consumerism, to confront its banality with one's own creative and not always very serious thoughts.

Mrs.Anja Wenn 
Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Department of Education