Passage of Entanglement

PIET ZWART (1885-1977) had no training in graphic design, so he was not limited by the rules and methods of tradition. He saw typography as an important cultural force in the twentieth century. As a “typotect” he constructed eloquent montages of text and images. He cut out photos and combined them with pointed texts and graphic elements such as bars, stripes and dots in the colors black, red and blue. Extreme differences in scale emphasized the dynamics.

The Stenberg brothers Vladimir (1899-1982) and Georgii (1900-1933) were Soviet artists and designers. The innovative visual aspects of their posters included a distortion of perspective, elements from Dada photomontage, an exaggerated scale, a sense of movement, and a dynamic use of color and typography. Their artwork was frequently based on stills from the films. ‘The man with the movie camera’ poster combines skills and design sensibilities to create a carefully structured and kinetic entity.

Ralph Schraivo­gel is a Swiss graphic de­signer with a pre­cise and metic­u­lous ap­proach. His pre­ferred means of ex­pres­sion is the poster, which he de­signs for sev­eral cul­tural agents in Switzer­land. His posters ra­di­ate ex­cite­ment and vi­brancy. The di­ag­o­nal in the poster for the Woody Allen ret­ro­spec­tive could be in­ter­preted as Broad­way, evok­ing as­so­ci­a­tions with a spe­cial pro­tag­o­nist, the urban neu­rotic, or Man­hat­tan. “As a designer, I’m not allowed to bore people. I need to make a surprising picture, like fire-works.”

Raffinerie designed the visual appearance of Theater Basel in 2014. The concept is based on the form of a cube – a symbol of the space the theatre fills with its performances. The high flexibility of the cube creates a concise base, other elements are the use of bright colors and the bold typeface which is distorted in the three dimensional space.

From 1994, the design duo Mevis & Van Deursen made for years the posters for the guest programming of the Muziektheater in Amsterdam. Linda van Deursen (1961): “The role of the graphic designer in posters has become increasingly limited; usually he doesn’t have to do more than put texts on a photo that he is obliged to use.” But for the first two years the duo worked with their own images, as in this example, where the photo of a passed out girl is combined with texts on bands creating a kind of barrier tape.

Anthon Beeke: “Oliviero Toscani became famous with his photos for Benetton. Photos that had nothing to do with fashion, but everything with war, violence, the threat of AIDS and the despair of refugees. For example, he photographed the blood-soaked clothes of a fallen soldier in Bosnia. I copied that image and had the text embroidered on the original Benetton poster. This poster is about flirting with suffering. That’s what Homer did, Toscani did, and I do the same. ”

Jean Carlu (1900–1997) was a French graphic designer who specialised in posters. As Carlu’s work evolved over the next two decades, it continued to show a concern with the geometric shapes of Cubism, which manifested itself in very different ways. Carlu sought to create a symbolic language in which color, line, and content would represent emotional values. In ‘America’s Answer! Production’(1942) text and image meet each other in the form of a bolt.

Anette Lenz & Vincent Perrottet use local images (sometimes featuring locals, like in this example) to increase local exposure in their series of posters for Le Nouveau Relax (a theater in Chaumont, FR). Perrotet: “A poster, to reach the other, must not seek to communicate only, but to happily subvert the view.”

Graphic designer Philippe Apeloig came to public attention with this dynamic poster for the Musée d’Orsay’s opening exhibition in 1987, ‘Chicago, Naissance du’une métropole 1872-1922’. It is one of the most clear examples of how text and image can fuse: pulling/pushing the viewer into the city is the word Chicago which begins in the distance and wraps around the corner of the skyscraper-filled street.

In 2002, together with Eric Belousov and Anna Naumova, Igor Gurovich created design bureau OSTENGRUPPE: “The poster isn’t dead, but its function has changed. It used to be an announcement vehicle once, now it’s kind of a marker of one’s private territory in this-is-a-message-to-those-who’re-with-us way. You can describe any event in your own way. And telling someone’s story in your own voice and manner is a work for a director.” In this poster Gurovich used the structure of a carpet to weave the text and images together.

Gielijn Escher is a Dutch designer who occupies a special position within graphic design. Escher honors craftsmanship: no computer is involved. He does almost everything himself, from making the images to cutting the letters. The clear and direct posters, in which text, image and content are often united, attract attention and also stand out in an urban environment. This poster announces the exhibition ‘Alles Slopen?!’ (Demolish Everything?!) on the work architect Piet Elling.

Wolfgang Weingart is an internationally known graphic designer and typographer, credited as “the father” of New Wave or Swiss Punk typography. ‘My work is like a quarry. People see a stone they like, appropriate it and work it until there’s nothing left.’ His typographic experiments were strongly grounded and based on an intimate understanding of the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic functions of typography in combination with images.

To honor the passing of his friend and fellow graphic designer Yusako Kamekura, Makoto Saito created two assemblages, Sunrise and Sunset. By fragmenting the structures into multiple elements Saito was able to create his arrangements: “I don’t trust words. You can say anything with words. I prefer a visual means of communication because it allows the message to be more direct”

‘Quick & Dirty’ is the title of this 3 colour screenprint on 120 grams/m2 Natronkraft paper designed by Harmen Liemburg as a contribution to an exhibition around the theme of piracy at the Caricatura gallery space in Kassel. Kneading elements together like a real-time map of pirate attacks around the world, the Jolly Roger flag, the United Nations symbol and a mixture leading newspaper mastheads leading into something ‘gothic’ is not unlogical in Liemburg’s ongoing practice of graphic explorations in visual and material culture.

Jan van Toorn designed from 1981 to 1987 seven posters for a series of exhibitions called ‘Mens en omgeving (Man and environment) at the De Beyerd visual arts centre in Breda. The posters, each one built upon the same graphic framework – triangular fragments of Italian actress Sophia Loren and her son – represent the final stage in the gradual development of Van Toorn’s montage method of image- and textconstruction.

Maureen Mooren concedes the very special fascination that she maintains since her childhood for stationery and office supplies: staplers, photocopiers, raw materials, simple papers... it may seem natural that she often materializes her designs as paper theaters. When Mooren designed the poster for the Chaumont International Poster and Graphic Design Festival in 2015, paper was once again the subject of the poster. Photographed from a specific point of view, rolled up posters turn into the back of books, a shelf of a library appears.

Graphic designer and filmmaker Lex Reitsma started in 1983 as an independent graphic designer. He is famous for determining the graphic identity of De Nederlandse Opera for 24 years. Reitsma designed this poster for the exhibition of 90 posters by Jan Bons in 2006 in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. The title “Bons 90” is constructed from leftovers of serpentine, and a colorful party item consisting of a narrow ring of thinly rolled paper: the exhibition was on the occasion of Bons’ 90th birthday.

Iconic graphic and type designer Takenobu Igarashi rose to prominence in the 1970s with his groundbreaking poster designs featuring hand-drawn, three-dimensional typographic drawings. They developed a new typographic language, featuring geometric type to evoke a heightened sense of depth using rigid grids and strict systems of perspective planes. “Takenobu Igarashi monumentalised type and typography when most of us were still living in Gutenberg’s shadow” (Steve Heller). See also: The Typotectural Suites.

After studying graphic design in Geneva, typography, photography and Gestalt psychology in London, Italian Bruno Monguzzi began his very diverse career in visual communication in 1961 with the crafting of a unique design grammar. The design of this poster he made for the exhibition of photographer Fausto Gerevini developed by the attempt to build his name photographically in curves to allude to the organic universe of Gerevini.

Thomas Couderc and Clément Vauchez met in 1997 in Besançon (FR) and, in 2007, set up their studio Helmo. In 2015, they designed this poster for the Typojanchi Biennial in Seoul, devoted to relations between city and typography. Following this theme, the type on the poster forms a cityscape, while the logo on the second building from the left becomes an antenna.