Gestalten - News

Dan Witz

angie — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:29:48 +0000

Light Star Express

The masterful paintings of American artist Dan Witz transform everyday subjects into intimate hyper-realistic depictions of the banalities of life, allowing us to suspend our disbelief long enough to enter the fascinating world of art.

Rooted in New York's punk rebellion, culture jamming, and the scary urban blight since the early eighties, this Brooklynite is not only a painter and street artist, but also a musician in the 1980s. His works have been exhibited in galleries throughout Europe and the US. In Gestalten.tv's latest feature, Witz sheds a light on Bar Shrines, Lamps and Other Paintings of Light, his first solo exhibition at Gestalten Space in Berlin, and why he rather likes his spectacular street art to serve a conscious purpose than to merely brand an ego.

Dan Witz's Exhibition at Gestalten Space

Berlin.Status [2]

Vanessa — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:40:28 +0000

Exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien

Berlin.Status [2] marks the second survey of new tendencies and trends in Berlin’s art scene, undertaken by the curators Sven Drühl and Christoph Tannert.

Following up on Berlin.Status [1], which has focused on Berlin-based artists born between 1973-1980, the second volume Berlin.Status [2] now features artists born between 1978–1984. Being dedicated to the future—with works by more than 50 artists, the show permits a look ahead to the potentials of the youngest generation of Berlin artists.

Berlin.Status [2] witnesses a broad spectrum of interventionist thinking and image-manipulating approaches, including video art, painting, non-figurative objects and the usage of low-budget materials as a typical Berlin characteristic. Changes in the art world don’t come about where games are played with image-building bricks for the creative industries, but in those places where meaningful questions are raised. Berlin's current position as the artist's Eldorado on the one hand and as a tourist magnet facing the well-known problems of structural changes like rising rents and gentrification on the other, serves as a motor for the artistic practice shown in this exhibition.

Participating artists are David Adamo, Song-Ming Ang, Julius von Bismarck, Thomas Chapman, Lise Chevalier, Simon Denny, Mariechen Danz, Uros Djurovic, Peter Dobroschke, Aleksandra Domanovic, Antje Engelmann, Larissa Fassler, Thilo Frank, Max Frisinger, Wolfgang Ganter, Stefanie Gutheil, Claas Gutsche, Emma Waltraud Howes, Zhang Hui, Michelle Jezierski, John Kleckner, Christoph Knäbich, Nuri Koerfer, Clemens Krauss, MARCELLVS L., Cyrill Lachauer, Oliver Laric, Daniel Lergon, Jennis Cheng Tien Li, Philip Loersch, Nik Nowak, Tim Plamper, Sophia Pompéry, Gabriel Rossell Santillán, Moritz Schleime, Dennis Scholl, Bettina Scholz, Sarah Schönfeld, Robert Seidel, Pola Sieverding, Lu Song, Natalia Stachon, Tim Stapel, Despina Stokou, Henning Strassburger, Asli Sungu, Reijiro Wada, Johannes Weiss, Clemens Wilhelm, Jordan Wolfson, Michael Wutz.

Vernissage: Thu, May 23, 7 – 10 PM. More on Berlin.Status [2].

Künstlerhaus Bethanien

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Two Free Tickets for the Belgrade Design Festival

angie — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:10:08 +0000

June 6th - 8th, Belgrade

Partnering with this year’s Belgrade Design Week, we are here to spread the good words about “Create new value!”.

This three-day conference gathers international speakers from the full spectrum of creative industries—branding, design, architecture, publishing, advertising, fashion, new media, film, entrepreneurship and culture—to offer creative professionals a chance to learn how to create new value and plan their own future in this innovation-driven era.

Gestalten invites you to attend this festival for free! We are happy to give away two complimentary tickets to our newsletter subscribers. We will contact the winners within the week. Subscribe here and stay in touch with us. Good luck!

Belgrade Design Week

International Poster and Graphic Design Festival

Vanessa — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:35:19 +0000

Gestalten at Chaumont

As the official media partner of the 24th International Poster and Graphic Design Festival this year, we are very proud be part of this must-attend event celebrating creativity and graphic design.

This festival will turn Chaumont into a festive design city and offer great opportunities to enjoy plenty of inspirational exhibitions, workshops, competitions, and conferences. Walking into the festival’s bookstore, visitors can find a great collection of our visual storytelling titles and pick up a free copy of our latest spring catalog.

Celebrating this occasion, the show Search/Find/Like/Share, curated by Gestalten's Creative Director Sven Ehmann and GDFB's Dennis Elbers, now returns to tell 16 thought-provoking visual stories about a society in transition. It has already been shown at last year's Graphic Design Festival Breda and beginning of this year in Belgrade.

The exhibition shows visual stories about a society in transition. In response to recent political, social and economic crises society requires social commitment: involvement on a large scale and conscious choices on a small scope. By visually unraveling the complex structures of our time, designers create a transparent view of the world. Their visual stories make the audience more aware of their own environment and behaviour on a personal to social level.

As an additional attraction at the International Poster and Graphic Design Festival, Dennis Elbers is also hosting a lecture at La Theatre on June 1st at 10:30 AM, in which he will discuss the concept and process behind this exhibition. Our popular visual storytelling titles will be given away during the lecture.

La Theatre’s Address:
Le Nouveau Relax - scène conventionnée de Chaumont 15 bis,
rue Lévy Alphandéry, 52000 Chaumont

Festival International de l'Affiche et du Graphisme

The International Poster and Graphic Design Festival

Spontaneous Interventions

Vanessa — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:31:57 +0000

Design Actions for the Common Good

Spontaneous Interventions, the official U.S. presentation at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition at last year's Venice Biennale, now comes to the Chicago Cultural Center.

Curated by Cathy Lang Ho, the exhibition is devoted to the growing movement of architects, designers, artists, and everday citizens who act on their own initiative in order to bring improvements to the urban realm, creating new opportunities and amenities for the public.

Cathy Lang Ho explains: “Our goal is to use the exhibition as a framework for understanding a larger movement, in which citizens all over the world are devising and implementing clever, low-barrier urban interventions to make their cities more inclusive, sustainable, pleasurable, and safer.”

As an updated version of the Venice presentation, Spontaneous Interventions now showcases 84 projects at the Chicago Cultural Center, supplementing the most recent local projects. To coincide with the exhibition, an outdoor living room will be set up at Chicago's Millenium Park, serving as outpost and venue for exhibition-related programs. The exhibition's resource room provides the visitor with further reference, including Gestalten's Urban Interventions and Going Public.

Read Cathy Lang Ho's full statement on Sponataneous Interventions and other essays.

Spontaneous Interventions

Infographic Thinking

Vanessa — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:08:28 +0000

Francesco Franchi Wins SPD Silver Award

The infographic Francesco Franchi developed together with the participants of Gestalten's Infographic Thinking workshop has been awarded Silver by the Society of Publication Design!

America in Africa details the United States’ military presence in Africa and was the primary hands-on example at the two-day workshop hosted by Francesco Franchi last July. He gave insight into how graphic editors filter information, establish relationships, discern patterns, and develop inspiring and stimulating solutions to contextualize information that simultaneously inspire, inform, entertain and even encourage critical thought.

Francesco Franchi is an editorial and information designer, and since 2008, the art director for IL – Intelligence in Lifestyle, the monthly news magazine of Il Sole 24 ORE, one of Italy’s top financial newspapers. Embracing new languages in journalism, Franchi is a true master of combining representation and interpretation, creating a visual form that is as graphic as it is narrative, as entertaining as it is informative. His work has been awarded on numerous occasions, including the European Design Awards and the renowned Malofiej conference.

More work by him is profiled in Visual Storytelling, Data Flow 2, and Turning Pages.

Francesco Franchi's Designing News, a perceptive book envisioning the future of news reporting, will be released by Gestalten this fall. Stay tuned for our upcoming releases here.

Gestalten Workshops

Catalog

Vanessa — Wed, 15 May 2013 09:08:12 +0000

Designed for a Manifesto

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then our new font Catalog is a tribute to all the classic serif typefaces.

This type brings together the elegance of humanistic Antiqua with a graphic design approach in order to achieve both the artistry and functionality of a classicist typeface. This font includes four weights and can be used as display typography as well as for text.

The Catalog typeface has been designed for the publication of a manifesto. Museum Frac Loraine in Metz, for which Nik Thönen had previously created lettering as well as its graphical appearance, tasked Binnenland with the design of a manifesto-style catalog and provided them with the opportunity of a typographic challenge.

ON—TYPE

Vanessa — Tue, 14 May 2013 09:33:38 +0000

Exhibition at Bauhaus Archive Berlin

The current show at Bauhaus Archive reveals why the discourse on historic and contemporary type is not only interesting to design experts.

Cooperating with the Gutenberg Museum and the FH Mainz/Designlabor Gutenberg, the Bauhaus Archive presents milestones in type design from more than 100 years—ranging from Bauhaus and Swiss Typography up to postmodern developments. Central figures and debates in the history of typography, as well as major theories, manifestos, and stocktaking accounts on the topic are introduced in this exhibition. Questions about legibility, digitization, and lowercase letter writing are illustrated and discussed.

As an interactive exhibition, ON—TYPE allows visitors to experiment with virtual applications and compile their individual catalogs with different selections of type samples.

ON—TYPE opens daily, except for Tuesdays, 10 AM – 5PM.
Download the Infoflyer.

ON—TYPE

Tobias Rehberger

Vanessa — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:02:47 +0000

Bar Oppenheimer

Last week, Tobias Rehberger opened a replica of his favorite Frankfurt bar in New York to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair.

In a Out of the Box manner, the second edition of Bar Oppenheimer has settled at Hotel Americano, corresponding to its original dimensions and interior.

Conceived as sculptural object and fully functioning bar, it reminds us of Rehberger's site-specific intervention at the Bar Caffeteria during the Venice Biennale four years ago, for which he was awarded the Golden Lion. Again, he does not only disperse his prismatic black and white pattern on the site—giving his work a visual trademark, but he also creates a tangible, direct experience through his usable installations.

The bar is open to public until May 14th.

Pilar Corrias

Korea Power

Vanessa — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:22:45 +0000

Re-opening of MAK Frankfurt

An unprecedented show on Korean Design and Identity has been launched with MAK Frankfurt's re-opening. Part of this exhibition is Dieter Leistner's photographic exploration of divided Korea.

His impressive portraits of Pyongyang and Seoul witness oppositions but at the same time join a visual concordance. The photo project by Dieter Leistner has been published by Gestalten under the title Korea–Korea.

With official permission the German photographer explored Pyongyang in 2006. The corresponding photos from Seould were taken six years later. Here he sought and found similar locations, but with a very different feel. His photos of public spaces in Pyongyang show bus stops with long lines of people waiting, spruced up government buildings, bronze statues of Communist heroes, soldier cemeteries, flower markets, and wide avenues with only a few cars and people. As for Seoul, the bus stops looked like oversized televisions, the bronze statues were of kings of the long-gone Korean empire, the flower markets neighbored on fish markets with a vast selection of wares, and the streets were choked with cars and people.

The German perspective revealed in Korea–Korea is supported by excerpts from two diaries: Philipp Sturm, who grew up in East Germany, accompanied Dieter Leistner to Pyongyang, and Ahn Hehn-Chu, who was born in Germany to Korean parents, has regularly visited Seoul since her childhood.

Photo: Bus stop in Pyongyang by Dieter Leistner.

Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt