Hasta La Ideas

Anish Kapoor’s first major solo show in Germany was accompanied by a handsome catalogue stained with red oil and designed by UK studio, Brighten the Corners. It has just won them the Grand Prize at the Tokyo Type Directors Club…

Symphony for a Beloved Sun was held at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The central work of the show consisted of a series of large conveyor belts, set up high in the space, which dropped heavy blocks of red wax onto the museum floor.

Brighten the Corners say that the notion of “tension” created by putting contemporary artworks within the neo-Rennaisance environment of the Martin-Gropius-Bau was something they wanted to reflect in the show’s publication.

Each catalogue’s cover is stained with red oil paint which then seeps through into its first pages. The book is also sewn with a bright red thread and boasts a red ‘cut’ to its edge.

“We wanted our book, itself a reference to the first Martin-Gropius-Bau catalogue of 1890, to be both elegant and unsettling,” say BTC.

“Maintaining the strict classical grid for all text and images meant that landscape images stretched across two pages, occupying the space they needed and reminding the reader of the works’ scale. Finding the right landscape images was a job in itself – hours were spent with Anish Kapoor studio in the photo archive.”

“Typographic chapter dividers grouped the works into categories and played further with scale by visually exploiting the font (Stempel Garmamond) and letting it have its moment in the book.”

The catalogue is published by Walter Koenig. Brighten the Corners are in Tokyo to receive the TDC Grand Prize this week and will also give a talk at the Design Forum, TDC Day. See
tdctokyo.org and brightenthecorners.com.