Klaus Staeck

German Workers! The SPD Wants to Take Away Your Villas in Ticino, West German federal election, 1972 A heavy blackletter Deutsche Arbeiter! shouts down at a halftone modernist villa, cut from a lifestyle magazine and printed in flat yellow on blue. The mock warning that the Social Democrats will seize workers' Swiss vacation homes lands because the picture and the words refuse to agree: no factory worker owned such a house. Staeck built a career on that gap between image and caption, printed cheaply and fast, and fought more than 40 court cases over his posters. His deadpan text-and-image collisions are often traced forward into Barbara Kruger's work and the post-punk graphics of Neville Brody and Malcolm Garrett.