Wolfgang Weingart

Wolfgang Weingart

11

Site includes articles, bibliography and collection of designer's work.

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As Weingart's design innovations from the early 1970s (including step-rules, size and weight contrasts, letterspaced type, and line rules moving through the space to link elements together) were widely emulated during the late 1970s. Weingart moved on to create collage-like compositions by layering film positives of images and type. This innovative technique enabled Weingart to juxtapose and overlay complex visual information. During this period, Weingart delighted in contrasts. Type, images, moire and halftone patterns, torn collage elements, and linear patterns are densely layered and stacked into rich, tonal graphic expressions.




Richard Paul Lohse: Zürcher Künstler im Helmhaus, 1950

Richard Paul Lohse

10

Site includes articles, bibliography and collection of Lohse's design work.

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Typographer, graphic designer, painter - 1918-22: trains as an advertising designer. 1922- 30: works at the Max Dalang studio in Zurich. 1930: opens his own advertising agency in Zurich. Produces much work for museums, publishers and industry. 1937: co-founder and deputy board member of the artists' group "Allianz", an association of modern Swiss artists. 1947-55: editor and designer of the architecture magazine "Bauen and Wohnen". 1958-65: publisher and editor of "Neue Grafik magazine in Zurich with Josef Müller-Brockmann, Hans Neuburg and Carlo Vivarelli.




Blow-Up

Blow-Up

09

Collection of articles and critical analysis on Antonioni's 1966 film. Includes gallery, publications and production information.

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Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up is a masterfully constructed and paced exploration of the enigmas that challenge our interpretations of both the moving and the still image. Photography plays a key role at the very core of the film, providing the metaphorical site for the directors questioning of the relationship between reality and perceptions.




Anselm Kiefer Poster der Engel der Geschite Mohn und Gedächtnis

Anselm Kiefer

08

Collection of artist's exhibitions posters. Includes interviews, bibliography and a selection of published articles.

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AnseIm Kiefer born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Baden-Württemberg, is one of the most renowned figures in contemporary art. Kiefer studied law and French at the University of Freiburg in 1965 before turning to painting. He graduated in 1970 and began informal study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys. Kiefer's vision encompasses philosophy, history, literature, politics and compelling moral issues – ranging from intimate books that encapsulate German identity to monumental public sculpture installations. Conceptually, Kiefer urges the viewer to challenge received narratives about war, identity, religion, morality, memory and history. Visually, his art is suffused with a sense of epic melancholy. His paintings exalt physical tactility, incorporating such organic matter as straw, sand and lead, to become elemental presences. Kiefer's longstanding leitmotivs have included the earth, the stars, architecture and alchemical symbols that evoke themes of devastation, metamorphosis and renewal. “I work with symbols that link our consciousness with the past. The symbols create a kind of simultaneous continuity, and we recollect our origins.” — Anselm Kiefer




Karl Gerstner Poster

Karl Gerstner

07

Site includes published articles, bibliography and collection of Gerstner's design work.

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Karl Gerstner was one of Switzerland's preeminent graphic designers. In 1959, he and Markus Kutter founded the agency Gerstner + Kutter, which later became Gerstner, Gredinger, and Kutter (GGK). Before long, the agency had become one of the largest internationally acclaimed advertising firms in Switzerland. After withdrawing from active agency work, Gerstner designed the corporate identities for such companies as Swiss Air, Burda and Langenscheidt, in addition to working as worldwide identity consultant and designer for IBM. Nobody matched Gerstner’s originality as a typographer nor his daring as an advertising designer, and as a theorist he was for decades the most coherent writer on graphics. Gerstner’s importance can be described in three ways. First, he had developed the idea of a flexible grid – the central theme of Gerstner’s thinking was on computational systems, which he described as ‘programmes’. Second, he was a pioneer of unjustified, ranged-left setting for text. Third, he had extended ‘functional’ into ‘integral’ typography, where the message and its form are inseparable and interdependent – idea, text and typographical presentation are one.




Art & Language Poster

Art & Language

06

Site includes published articles, bibliography and gallery of selected artwork.

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Art & Language [Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden] was the name given in 1968 to a collaborative practice developed initially in England by Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell. Drawing on linguistic philosophy they investigated the conceptual and ideological presuppositions underlying art’s institutionalisation, through discussions, the exhibition of their working materials in various forms such as indexes, and in the journal Art-Language, launched in 1969 and edited from 1971 by the critic Charles Harrison. They acquired associates in New York among whom were the Australian artist lan Burn, another British artist, Mel Ramsden, and US artists Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov and Kathryn Bigelow. By 1979 only Baldwin and Ramsden continued to operate under the group’s original name, producing works that investigate relationships between formalism and ideology.




Christopher Wool Poster

Christopher Wool

05

Gallery of artist's exhibitions posters. Includes interviews, bibliography and a selection of published articles.

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Equally concerned with process and picture-making, Christopher Wool's works explore points of intersection between signage and language, pattern and decoration—typically by altering found, mass-producible imagery through techniques of layering, overpainting, and variations in register. Since the late 1980s, Wool has produced black-and-white text paintings consisting of single words and pointed phrases in allover compositions of stenciled block letters. He has also executed paintings based on decorative motifs such as vines, flowers, and polka dots. In 1995 Wool began using a spray gun to apply black paint in a drawing-like manner onto both paper and aluminum surfaces. Later he employed the spray gun in conjunction with more conventional silkscreen and painting techniques. Wool's critical engagement with the history of painting has resulted in hybrid approaches that combine the emphasis on gesture and touch of Abstract Expressionism with the cool, mediated remove of Pop Art.




Geigy Graphic Design

Geigy Graphic Design

04

Site includes gallery, bibliography and articles on the company's graphic work.

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The design studio of J. R. Geigy AG was the launching pad for one of the great periods of Swiss graphic design in the 1950s and 1960s. The resulting works reveal a modernist formal idiom without being indebted to a specific, formulaic look. There was room in it for visual symbolism as well as the acquisition of nonrepresentational art, with which some of the graphic designers involved were connected. Under the leadership of Max Schmid for many years, the studio employed Roland Aeschlimann, Karl Gerstner, Jörg Hamburger, Steff Geissbühler, Andreas His, Toshihiro Katayama, and Nelly Rudin, among others.




Last Year at Marienbad

Last Year at Marienbad

03

Comprehensive collection of articles and critical analysis on Alain Resnais' 1961 film. Includes bibliography, gallery, articles and production information.

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L'Année dernière à Marienbad (released in the US as Last Year at Marienbad and in the UK as Last Year in Marienbad) is a 1961 French-Italian Left Bank film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet.




Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys

02

Collection of artist's exhibitions posters. Includes biography, chronology, articles, bibliography and exhibition information.

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German sculptor, performance artist, printmaker and teacher. He opposed the concept of art as based on such autonomous genres as panel painting and sculpture. Instead he pursued in his performance art ('Aktionen') and sculpture an 'expanded concept of art', aimed at a total permeation of life by creative acts.




Wim Crouwel

Wim Crouwel

01

Comprehensive collection of designer's work. Includes biography, chronology, articles, typography, bibliography and exhibition information.

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While Crouwel’s designs are pared down to their essentials, within them there is a surprising willingness to adopt a variety of approaches to the graphic space. His work registers the truth that the solution to a design problem is not an abstract concept, but something rooted in the concrete.