'A Scene at the Outskirts of the Village', link between Orient and Occident. It could be the illustration to a fairy tale by Hauff, recalling art from the previous century. A riddle: What's happening? Is something underway? The carpet is laid for the meal. We are transported to another land. People are gathering under the open sky.

Sonntagnachmittag (Sunday Afternoon), two generations sit at the table. The observer must make sense of the riddle on the faces for him/herself. The clergy joins in too. Tübke's art is irritating under its appearance of normalcy, and this is its strong point. The trees are bare, the wind blows fresh. These are the experienced lines of a brilliant draftsman. A pencil drawing was the inspiration for this lithograph.

Drawing is Tübke's passion. His lithographs are done through the transfer process. 'Trauergäste' (Guests of Mourning): On a makeshift bier, a puppet-like figure is being carried away. These infantas are not made of flesh and blood. Their artificial presence make their hands appear rigid. An eerie sensation seeps out of the details. The unreal, a false disjointedness is at home here.

A print characteristic of Tübke's work, of great density. The printing color, vermilion, is also well chosen for this extraordinary world stage. Four veterans sit next to one another. The old tree is budding new leaves. The hydrant is hardly useable any more, displaying the architecture of a ruin. The woman is holding an air spirit in her hands, and presiding over everything is a chimera's head. Yet no one blinks at this mirage, whether in defense or in triumph, and it all remains a simple fringe phenomenon, a "Randerscheinung".

Tübke's etching 'Sinai' is glowing red. The world on Mount Sinai, the mountain of Moses. Two ships have landed. Perhaps it is two commanders who step out of them. Columns from bygone cultures. The city with its encircling walls in the folds of the mountain stands before the enormity of time.

Tübke is known for his great depictions of military themes and battles, in which he focuses on everyman. The defeated and the victors, homecoming and workers. This print also displays a highly refined etched stroke, West-Kaukasus (In the Western Caucasus). The eye of the Holy Trinity watches over the men. Is it Gabriel, Michael or Lucifer who leads them towards the abyss, invoking Emmaus and the God they cannot see? The mystery remains intact. Tübke provides no solution to the riddle which he illuminates.

Tübke's forte lies in the riddles he poses and his refusal to solve them for us. This 'Childhood Memories' (Kindheitserinnerungen) recall works by Horst Janssen. Here veterans are in another time. In courtly garments and uniforms, they wade through the water. They seem constructed of sticks, these human puppets. One of them hold a torch over the water and is about to fall, another carries a bow, but where is the guitar? Will they be carried away by the currents of time, as suddenly as they appeared? And the woman? Its as if she were holding a thin thread of life in her hands.

The petrified atmosphere surrounding the figures make it difficult to tell life from death. 'Memories of Provence' (Erinnerung an die Provence). The new era has not yet begun, the old one seems interrupted. Nothing will follow, wince nothing has come before, not even the king's general. The hilly land lies still in the background. No one turns to look afterwards. ek