ATAK
27 02 10 - 21:08
Friday Georg Barber aka ATAK came to my school (Ar.Co) to give an informal lecture about his work. I already knew his work superficially, but as of now, I am officially a very big fan. He is not only an amazing and extremely talented illustrator but he was also really charismatic and funny, in a very cute, nervous way. He was born in 1967 in East Germany, more specifically Frankfurt (Oder), in the German-Polish border. He showed us the very first drawing he did, of which he remembers being pround of. It was amazing. He also showed us a painting he did from 1975, from when he was 8, and it was more amazing. That shocked me.
He also mentioned in the 80's he had a band named ATAK, which is where his alias comes from, also that his band was more influenced by Einstürzende Neubauten rather than Kajagoogoo, haha. I loved the fact that he used many pop culture and music references. He mentioned various bands but what I remember the most is a project where he took inspiration from The Beatles' Revolution 9 and also another one by the Beastie Boys, which seemed to be his favourites. He mentioned he loved their attitude, borrowing things from many different places and transforming them however they wanted. There is kind of a punk feel to his artwork, too. He also uses a lot of references to popular comics and cartoons, but not just that, I also noticed one of Yoshitomo Nara's little girls in one of his pictures. You can really tell he is influenced a lot by Japanese pop art, I dare to say there's even a bit of Tadanori Yokoo in there. And Ukiyo-e, of course. He uses a lot of random kanji and katakana, too.
I remember he showed us one of the very first fanzines he made, and said that because it was very expensive to print in color back then and he had to use black and white - I'm thinking this was still in the 80's - he covered everything in different patterns so that they would somehow substitute colour. So that kind of determined his style. I like this idea! I wish there was more of the work he shared with us on his website, and more information about him in english on the internet. Still it was so very difficult for me to pick which images to share! I started out with 25, then narrowed them down to 10 - which is still a lot!
Everyone was very quiet and hardly ever asked any questions, which I guess made him a little nervous. Besides our teachers the only one who dared to speak was my rather strange classmate André, who lacks a certain filter and lives in his own world of odd interests and youtube memes. To finish the lecture he showed us the animated music video he made for the band Monoland, which was awesome, and when it was over it actually took people a while to start clapping. Then he pointed to some postcards of his work which were free to take, but there weren't many so I just took two. Some people reached over to talk to him, and even if he was a regular nice guy I didn't really have the guts to say anything. But if I had said anything it would just be "You're awesome, I love your work, I want to be you when I grow up". Not very exciting.
All images stolen from http://www.fcatak.de/
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