'Politics and provocation': Jacques Tilly's caricatures

"Politics and Provocation" is the title of the exhibition showing XXL caricatures by satirist Jacques Tilly, who mainly designs huge, 3D figures for Dusseldorf's annual Carnival parade. Some of them are on display at the Ludwiggalerie Schloss Oberhausen art collection in northwest Germany (February 2 — June 14). Brexit is a major — and timely — focus.

Trump is another rewarding topic for Tilly. Above, the US president is portrayed as a baby in overflowing diapers, tearing up the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Environmental activists displayed the 7-meter tall object in front of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg during the G20 summit in July 2017, which Trump attended. One month earlier he had said the US would leave the deal.

Tilly supports Swedish environmental and climate protection activist Greta Thunberg's ideas and goals. His 2019 drawing shows her angrily pulling the ears of the parents' generation ("Eltern-Generation") and demanding, "Do something about the climate disaster already!" The float built with Greta's image for the 2019 Dusseldorf Carnival parade is still used by the Fridays for Future movement.

This Tilly float dates from 2016. Angela Merkel sits in a boat and is turned upside down by a wave bearing the words "Refugee wave." She may be upside down, but she remains undaunted, her fingertips touching each other in a kind of rhombus, a gesture she typically makes.

Tilly and his team build the larger-than-life figures in a large hall in Dusseldorf. A framework of wooden poles is covered with wire mesh, coated in paper-mache and later painted. Tilly's figures stand out because of their strong facial features, which have a high recognition value. The gigantic caricatures are quite self-explanatory.

Politicians' heads are a Tilly trademark: Be it Merkel or Trump, they are immediately recognizable. A cherubic Trump figure was on a 2019 float behind Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who wielded a bloody chainsaw while "guardian angel" Trump held his hands protectively over him. Only the Trump figure is shown in the exhibition (above with another Merkel figure).

This 2017 drawing shows caterpillars symbolizing five right-wing conservative political leaders (Poland's Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the US' Trump, Turkey's PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russia's Vladimir Putin and Hungary's Viktor Orban) who gnaw away at a leaf democracy. In Poland, a float based on the drawing accompanies campaigns of government critics for democracy and the constitution.

Time and again, Tilly points his finger at global right-wing populists. He sees values such as the rule of law and pluralism as threatened by a "new wave of authoritarian thinking." Tilly has raised the issue repeatedly in designs for his carnival floats, like the above one, "Blond is the New Brown," in 2017. In Germany, the color brown has historically represented the political far right.

The world was shocked after the attacks on journalists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015. Many German carnival parade groups refrained from satirizing the topic because of the danger involved. Tilly, however, felt a "sense of proportion" was called for and designed a float for the Dusseldorf parade just a few weeks later that stated, "Satire cannot be killed."