II. 2002 – 2008 Arbeitswelt in den USA - Tylle, H. D.

with technical subjects. Engaging in free art, the artists created works independent of any doctrine
and executed in highly different styles and with different painting techniques. The Sixties then saw
the emergence of fantastic, techno-cosmological and futuristic landscapes, distorted machines and
themes that, exploring the full range of possibilities, dealt with the relationship between man and
machine. Such works are associated with such artist personalities as Mac Zimmermann (born 1912),
Peter Klasen (born 1935), Gernot Bubenik (born 1924), Wolfgang Fräger (1923-1983) and Reinhold
Köhler (born 1919). In the last few years (from about 1975 onward), we have observed that, owing
to the growing trend toward the rationalization and mechanization of work, a new, realistic trait is
emerging in contemporary painting that aims to document work processes controlled by microprocessors
in all clarity and precision. Along with Harald Duwe (1926 – 1984), who painted his “Body
Assembly” at BMW in 1975, we must mention above all H.D. Tylle, who paints “on location” and
who is concerned with an intensive analysis of the theme of “industrial labor”. This embracing of a
new realism, which involves the painter being immersed like a worker in the world of labor and toiling
where production takes place, imports a subtle, credible and – sometimes radical – element of social
criticism into the resultant picture. Tylle is one of the very few artists to rediscover the visual theme of
mining as a branch of industry and as an economic factor, while anonymous “industry” used to be
the almost exclusive goal of depiction.
How Tylle approaches the themes of his pictures and what conception he has of pictorial work
becomes clear from his own account given below. Tylle’s “style” is best termed “critical realism”,
whereby this realism is also a method. It is characteristic of a committed painting that calls on the
artist to state his social position and whose goal is not to gloss over but to educate. Its effect lies not
in nostalgic invocations of the past, but in “making buried conceptions of a better reality visible, and
stimulating the imagination and thought” (Straka).
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