Hasta La Ideas

Two Düsseldorf artists bring their photo fanzines to the city’s experimental music festival

A combination of experimental art and music, the Open Source Festival hits Düsseldorf this Saturday, and two of the city’s leading artists will be there peddling the latest issue of their notoriously coveted fanzines. Produced in limited edition, Issue #41—entitled “Das März Heft”&#8212comprises eight evocative images creators Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber shot in Japan last March. Out of their standard run of 105 copies, 15 pack an extra special punch accompanied by a clear vinyl record from Elektrohorror, a project by Düsseldorf musician Sven Vieweg.

Festival-goers that don’t get their hands on the special OSF issue can still take home a unique edition. Stuke and Sieber are bringing enough photographs with them for around 50 people to create their own zine. Once the fanzines sell out and the festival is over, they will release a final batch of 35 copies, still comprised of entirely different photos reflecting their time spent in Tokyo, Sendai and Osaka, which will also be available for purchase online.

The creative duo behind Germany’s subversive ANTIFOTO photo show (which this year included Jason Evans, Ted Partin and Olivier Cablat to name a few), Stuke and Sieber are known for their candid portraits and have an extensive roster of international exhibitions in their portfolio along with their self-published zines. Pick one up from their website for €65, where you can check out several other books and projects.

Lit is an eco-aware, unbreakable light bulb that revisits the old incandescent. Giving timeless design a new meaning, the bulb adapted to different types of lighting fixtures and is customizable because the sockets are modular. The designer claims it to be the world’s first light bulb with a hybrid technology – LEDs and Optical fiber. Apparently the technology gives an incredible lifetime to the bulb, with an excellent dimmable light quality trough the time. Money savings and reduced enviornmetal impacts are assured!

Designer: Elie Ahovi

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(Old Incandescent Repackaged was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel has created two new typefaces for London type company The Foundry, based on his work for exhibition catalogues and posters from the 1960s and 1970s.

Architype Ingenieur (above and top) is a grid-based font that comes in four weights, including a dot matrix.

Architype Vierkant (above and below) is related to his controversial New Alphabet of 1967, which only used vertical and horizontal strokes in response to early digital display screens.

Dezeen interviewed Crouwel about his career to coincide with a retrospective of his work at the Design Museum last year. Watch the movie here or below and read more about his work in our earlier story.

Here’s some more information from The Foundry:

Foundry Types launches two new Crouwel typefaces

Building on its longstanding collaboration with Wim Crouwel, The Foundry – the London based independent type foundry set up by Freda Sack and David Quay – has launched two new typefaces by the Dutch design legend.

Architype Ingenieur is a four weight family inspired by Crouwel’s late 1950s exhibition catalogues and posters. Available in light, bold, regular and dot, the typeface was inspired by the simplified geometric letterforms Crouwel created for various exhibition catalogues and posters during the late 1950s.

Influenced by his boyhood fascination with naval lettering, Crouwel designed grid-based type with 45-degree angles for the Olanda poster for the Dutch entry to the 1960 Venice Biennale. A subtle variation on this appeared in the 1960 Stedelijk Museum catalogue for painter Jean Brusselmans; and several dot matrix versions followed.

Architype Vierkant has been developed from the letterforms that Crouwel created on the theme ‘typo vision international’ for a 1972 Drupa catalogue. This references many of the experimental ideas which underpin his controversial New Alphabet and Fodor typefaces. This single weight typeface forms part of the Architype Crouwel Collection.

Both typefaces are part of Foundry Types’ newly expanded Architype Collections. The other collections in the series – Architype Konstrukt and Architype Universal – feature typefaces created from the experimental typographic work of artists and designers including Josef Albers, Jan Tschichold, Herbert Bayer, Kurt Schwitters and Theo Ballmer.

All fonts are available to licence direct from the new website www.foundrytypes.co.uk which now offers Opentype versions of all of the Foundry’s typefaces. Designers are invited to submit examples of their work which use the Foundry’s typefaces for inclusion on its new blog.

About The Foundry

Set up in London in 1989 by David Quay and Freda Sack, The Foundry is the trademark of the highly respected typeface library, which is managed and run by Foundry Types Limited. Some of its best-selling releases include Foundry Sans, Foundry Wilson, Foundry Monoline and Foundry Gridnik.

Both of The Foundry’s partners continue to develop new typeface designs to expand the font collection. They bring a combination of traditional and modern approaches to font design and implementation, having worked in every technological stage of type design since hot metal, particularly being involved with the beginnings of digital font technology. Their pre-digital experience and skills lend integrity and quality to their type design.

Movie: Wim Crouwel
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An unlikely exhibition pits the New York School rebel against Renaissance Masters

It’s hard to imagine that Cy Twombly, with his canvases composed of angry scratch marks and messy swathes of paint, would have been influenced by 16th-century French painting. But the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s leading modern art museum, proposes just that in its exhibition “Cy Twombly & The School of Fontainebleau“. The School of Fontainebleau was a Mannerist decorative style led, oddly enough, by two Italian artists Rosso Fiorentino (1494-1540) and Francesco Primaticcio (1504-1570), who were commissioned to decorate the Palace of Fontainebleau, built on the edge of a forest 45 miles from Paris for the king’s hunting retreats.

Fiorentino and Primaticcio oversaw everything from the paintings and frescos to tapestries and sculptures, and even used “graphic media to disseminate their programmatic style,” making them not only some of the most renowned artists of the period, but the most media-savvy as well.

Flash forward two and half centuries to Twombly and the New York School of painters. After Twombly left New York and the studio he shared with Robert Rauschenberg (whose works are shown in the same gallery at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, along with other prominent figures from the New York School), Twombly moved to Italy where he engaged with European art history in a way he never had before. He was especially moved by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), whose style was heavily influenced by Fiorentino and Primaticcio’s graphics. Even though his admiration for the Classical Baroque style seems unlikely, in 2008 Twombly admitted, “I would have liked to have been Poussin, if I’d had a choice, in another time.”

Like Poussin, Twombly often explored myths in his work. “Leda and the Swan” is, of course, about how Zeus transformed himself into a swan in order to come down to earth and rape the mortal Leda, and his “Apollo and The Artist” series is comprised of eight drawings of inscriptions of the word “Virgil”. More specifically, Twombly’s “Empire of Flora” is a direct reference to Poussin’s painting of the same name and explores similar themes of metamorphosis “set in a heroic landscape as an amorous allegory of desire.”

When viewed side by side, you can see elements of Twombly’s pencil work in Poussin’s sketches and studies for larger oil paintings like “The Conversion of St. Paul”. Though it’s not uncommon for modern art museums like the Hamburger Bahnhof to have amassed a collection of modern painters like Twombly, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, it is uncommon to see their work curated in direct relation to centuries-old painting, and by making unique connections curators Eugen Blume and Matilda Felix manage to keep works in heavy rotation as fresh and exciting as they were when Twombly’s controversial scratch marks first shook up the art world.

“Cy Twombly & The School of Fontainebleau” runs through October 2012. Find image credits after the jump.

Hamburger Bahnhof

Invalidenstraße 50-51

10557 Berlin, Germany

Image credits:

Empire of Flora: “Empire of Flora” (1961), by Twombly

School of Fontainebleau: “School of Fontainebleau” (1960), by Twombly

Poussin: a study for “The Conversion of St. Paul” (1657) by Nicolas Poussin

Thyrsis: “Thyrsis” (1977), by Twombly

heute – the german word for today – is spontaneous, intuitive and emotional. today is always different, always individual and – today is s..