exhibition Archives - Page 25 of 27

have shaped its position within the city of Nottingham as a leading exponent of innovative exhibition practice.”

Iain & Andrew Foxall took a trip to Nottingham last week to visit the gallery. Whilst here they also took a look around the various workshops and met with technicians and teaching staff, all in preparation for their ‘Publishing Rooms’ project taking place in the gallery next year in April. Inspiration was found all across the site, here’s a few snaps taken by Andrew during the day…

Over the next few weeks we’re going to feature the work of five renowned designers, giving you an introduction to the life and works of the individuals who have helped shape the design world over the last century and inspired the Alan Kitching and Monotype exhibition.

FHK Henrion

Born in Germany in 1914, Frederic Henri Kay Henrion worked in Paris as a textile designer before moving to the UK in 1936 to work on a commission as a poster designer. During World War II, Henrion was employed by the British Ministry of Information and the US Office of War Information. Post-war, he established himself as a poster and exhibition designer, going on to work for companies across Europe and becoming ” the founding father of modern corporate identity in Europe”. Henrion’s work can still be seen today, including logos and identities that he created for KLM, Tate & Lyle and Blue Circle Industries.

Read about the many faces of FHK Henrion over on the Creative Review website.

Josef Müller-Brockmann

I would advise young people to look at everything they encounter in a critical light … Then I would urge them at all times to be self-critical.’

Famed for his instantly recognisable clean-cut designs and use of grid systems, Josef Müller-Brockmann’s work and writing has inspired many throughout the years, including Alan Kitching.

Paul Rand

Known for his often playful designs and book covers, Paul Rand was one of the foremost designers in the mid 1900’s. Some of his most famous work (some of which is still used today) includes corporate logo designs for IBM, ABC and UPS. Rand also wrote several books on design theory and lectured at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Tom Eckersley

As well as designing for several public service agencies and companies such as Guinness, Gillette, KLM and the Post Office, Tom Eckersley also helped to establish the UK’s first undergraduate Graphic Design course in 1945.Take a look through a selection of Eckersley’s poster designs, find out more about his work, and read an interview between Eckersley and Abram Games (another featured Pioneer of the Poster).

Alan Kitching and Monotype: Celebrating Five Pioneers of the Poster opens in just under 3 week’s time! Ahead of the opening, Alan sat down with LeftLion to discuss the origins of the exhibition, the changes in design over the last century, and what it takes to stand out as a designer – plus much more…

You originally showed this exhibition in 2014, where did the concept come from?

In 2013 I was invited to New York by Monotype and Eye Magazine as part of a week of seminars, talks and things, and Monotype asked me to participate in one of their publications. I told them that I don’t do books but I’d do a series of sheets folded up in to a slip case, and they agreed to that. When I got back to London I had to think of what to do. My girlfriend then was Naomi Games, the daughter of Abram Games, the English poster artist. She had written about her father extensively, and in her latest book the very first sentence said that when he was born in 1914 there were four other designers born in the same time: Paul Rand in America, Josef Müller-Brockmann in Switzerland, Tom Eckersley in Britain, FHK Henrion in Germany. They were all were very influential and important graphic designers, all born in the same year, and they more or less all died around the same time.

So, for the Monotype publication – 2014, when we published this series, it was their centenary – I invented five monograms based on their initials to go on the sheets, and this is where the idea for the exhibition came from. Although they were all graphic designers, they all did very different work and I based the monographs on their style of design. On the other side of the sheets was a little biography, and that’s also part of the exhibition. The rest of the exhibition is the work that these five guys did – posters, books and whatever to show the background of what they did and where they came from, to make more sense of my monograms.

Graphic design, and typography – like all art, goes through fashions. Do you have a favourite period?

Rand, Eckersley and Games and so on, they were artist designers, if you like. And it changed, the whole thing got more commercial, so by the time the sixties arrives, new designers came along. I was brought up in the design of the sixties which was Fletcher Forbes Gill, and Derek Birdsall. They were the hot shot designers when I first came to London – the scene had started to change. Graphic design wasn’t what it is now. The clients were different, they were more of a commodity and used in corporate ways. Now it’s almost come to its conclusion but then it was still in an embryonic stage. There were very individual styles, you could recognise their work, it had a very distinctive touch to it whereas nowadays it’s very difficult to know immediately who’s done something.

Can you pinpoint what it is in a designer/their work that elevates them to something more than the standard?

It is difficult. To go back a bit. The designers I knew – Birdsall, Fletcher, Gill – they were all very well-read people. They were intelligent. They were very smart. They were bright. … You have to have a certain amount of intelligence to do design, you have to be well-versed in all sorts of levels of knowledge. The good designers have got that, they can draw on references – they know about music, literature, all sorts of things which they can pull on and make connections with. This shows in people’s work.

It’s not just a question of being good at visual manipulation of images anymore, you have to understand the background to it all. … An American artist called Ben Shann … did wonderful lettering, he used Hebrew letters and Arabic letters, and all his lettering is kind of wrong. The stress is wrong. It’s all back to front and odd, but very beautifully done. What I’m getting to is, to do something like that, a very refined version of something, you’ve got to know where it’s coming from – you’ve got to know how to do something the correct way before you can do it wrong.

Spatial development and curatorial planning happening concurrently in the gallery, exciting times ahead.

As part of Icons of Rhetoric there is a segregated space within the Gallery which reveals more about the photographs and the theory employed behind the idea of reading North Korea through its own discourse. Including a range of publications on issues surrounding North Korea and photojournalism:

One of these publications is Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing is Believing by David Shim. In a similar way to the main exhibition, his book questions what we know about North Korea and how much of this is based on what we see. You can preview the book online here.

Another featured publication is Pyongyang, a graphic novel by cartoonist and animator Guy Delisle, which documents his two-month visit to the North Korean capital – giving the reader “an informative, personal, and accessible look at a dangerous and enigmatic country.”

You can find out more about Pyongyang here, and preview the book here.

Overcame the tube strikes last Thursday to visit Iain & Andrew Foxall of Foxall Studio in their workspace at Great Western Studios in London. They will be creating a project for the gallery next April which is looking & sounding incredibly exciting. Take a look at their website for further info about their previous projects, ‘Webcams’ and ‘Lagos Fanzine’ probably offer the closest indication of what might be in store for 2016…

Open until Friday 10 July, Monday – Friday 10 am – 5 pm. For more information, visit the Icons of Rhetoric exhibition page.

On 12 June, Castlefield Gallery (Manchester) opened their major Summer exhibition, Real Painting; a group exhibition curated by Deb Covell and Jo McGonigal, which “emphasizes the essential grammar of painting, considering not necessarily what a painting means but what it ‘does’.”

Following on from his solo exhibition Soft Painting here in the gallery in April / May this year,Simon Callery is exhibiting works which continue to focus on engaging the viewer on a physical level, rather than just a reaction to an image.

Installation view from Simon Callery: Soft Painting; Wiltshire Modulor Double Void, 2010 – 2015.

Other artists include; Adriano Costa, Deb Covell, Angela de la Cruz, Lydia Gifford, David Goerk, Alexis Harding, Jo McGonigal, DJ Simpson, Finbar Ward.

Real Painting will be on show until Sunday 2 August, 2015. For more information, visit the exhibition page on Castlefield Gallery’s website here, and be sure to follow Castlefield Gallery on Facebook and Twitter for more images from the show.

Following on from the #NTUDEGREESHOW, our next exhibition opens on Thursday this week!

Icons of Rhetoric is a project created by photographer Chris Barrett and writer Gianluca Spezza which gives us a unique look at “the most isolated country in the world”; North Korea. The exhibition includes over 40 images which are crafted from taking still images from North Korean television broadcasts by the country’s state news network. The pair use appropriated images developed on instant film, to comment on how the West uses such images to reinforce its own limited stereotypical views of the country.

“We’re exploring the idea of ‘seeing is believing’ in the digital age” says Barrett. “People’s concerns about human rights in North Korea are perfectly valid and important issues but it’s dangerous for us to entirely base our understanding on a narrow binary image of good and bad often focused on sensationalised information skewed in favour of click bait ridicule or ridiculous hearsay’. It’s true North Korea is a very difficult place to cover but this should not allow for the anything goes #rareglimpse reporting that seems to surround the country”