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22/11/2010

Two exhibitions

MAK Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Wien

100 Best Posters 09.
Germany Austria Switzerland

Curator Peter Klinger, MAK Library and Works on Paper

This year’s poster competition, “100 Best Posters 09. Germany Austria Switzerland,” has once again demonstrated the intuitive power to be found in present-day communication design. Beginning on Wednesday, 24 November 2010, the MAK Exhibition Hall will present the works nominated for awards, framed by creative exhibition architecture, in a showing conceived to reflect present-day trends in contemporary graphic design. The posters, selected by an international jury of experts, are meant to send out a signal and play a role in the current discourse. Since 2006, the MAK has been mounting annual exhibitions featuring the winners of what is arguably the most important poster design competition in the German-speaking world.

In February of 2010, the jury—consisting of Trix Barmettler (graphic designer, Zurich, committee chairwoman), Prof. Günter Karl Bose (graphic designer, Berlin; Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig), Flavia Cocchi (graphic designer, Lausanne), René Grohnert (German Poster Museum, Museum Folkwang, Essen) und Reinhold Luger (graphic designer, Bregenz)—convened to selected the 100 best posters from over 1,600 submissions made by advertising agencies, graphic designers, students and freelancers. This time around, there were 484 individual entrants competing. The project winners are distributed as follows: 65 of them come from Germany, 31 from Switzerland and four from Austria.

In general, the submitted works indicate a trend which is moving away from typographical experiments in favor of clear structuring elements. In their works, the nominees concentrated on direct communication and precise pictorial statements. Alongside cultural events, socially critical themes featured prominently in the range of subject matter for 2009.

This year, Austria’s Eva Dranaz, working together with Jochen Fill, once again succeeded in communicating unsettling moments via her insects 09 theme for the monthly posters of “rhiz – bar modern,” a club in Vienna’s 8th district. The posters show strongly magnified insects with dissected limbs on a white background. Here, as is usually the case in Dranaz’ work, the artistic statement dominates—alluding to mortality, to life and death. The compositions of dead insects, achieved without resorting to photomontage techniques, reveal the aesthetic qualities and beauty of that which typically goes unnoticed.

This year, as well, the winners include a female student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In her poster “Grafische Revue,” Agnes Steiner deals with a designer lecture and the presentation of diploma works at “the Angewandte,” her university, presentations which she associates with the French word VUE—this gives rise to combinations such as Entrevue, à Vue, Prevue, en vue.

For the annual symposium “architecture live” held by the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts, Paulus Dreibholz designed an announcement consisting of two parts. All his works exhibit a deep understanding of form and its effects on human perception. The basic structure of the posters’ design is based on architectonic interpretations of classical-functionalist architectural history: circle, semicircle, square and line are formed into numbers.

A quotation of the Buddhist nun Lama Yeshe Sangmo—“Thoughts are like snowflakes that fall on a hot stove”—was the conceptual starting point for a backlit poster campaign in the city of Linz designed by Helmut Prochart in cooperation with Beate Göbel. Starting with four stove burners, which (lined up side-by-side) display the “snowflake” motif as a repeating pattern, the project’s initiators (Kunstraum Goethestraße xtd, Neuland OÖ and pro mente OÖ) sought to highlight problematic aspects of the relationships between psychologically ill people and their surroundings.

A further noteworthy example is the entry of Megi Zumstein, Claudio Barandun and Daniel Peter, an exhibition poster entitled Formlose Möbel [Formless Furniture] which they designed for the Museum of Design in Zurich. The concept of this exhibition, which was created and shown at the MAK in Vienna during 2008, after which it continued on to Zurich’s Museum of Design, was communicated visually by the poster’s designers in a fitting way: the poster communicates a “sitting feeling” attributable to the 1968-generation, a group which is associated with social freedom, easygoing playfulness and popular culture. For their poster, the graphic designers fused two design icons created in 1968—they took the armchair Ciprea by Afra and Tobia Scarpa and made a graphical transition from it into the form of the famous Sacco of designers Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro.

The exhibition concept arose from a semester project at the Offenbach Academy of Art and Design conducted under the guidance of Prof. Peter Eckart and with the participation of students Jakob Gresch, Brita Jaichner, Hanna Kruse, Marc-Samuel Ulm and Barbara Wildung.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the catalog 100 Beste Plakate 09. Deutschland Österreich Schweiz. Wild, with a written contribution by René Schober and Peter Klinger entitled “Wild plakatieren!” [“Put up posters like wild!”].

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23 November 2010–27 February 2011
Contemporary. Jewelry from Austria

The “Eligius” award for body jewelry and jewelry objects, named for the patron saint of goldsmiths, is conferred by the Province of Salzburg every three years and has a value of EUR 5,000. A scholarship (worth EUR 2,500) is also awarded. Beginning on 24 November, the MAK Metal Study Collection will host an exhibition showing works by the 20 jewelry artists who were nominated for the final round of the award competition. This year’s renowned Eligius Jewelry Award was won by Petra Zimmermann, with the scholarship going to Agnes Czifra. The jury, consisting of graphic designer Gunter Damisch, artist Susanne Hammer (winner of the first Eligius Jewelry Award in 2005) and Elisabeth Schmuttermeier, MAK Curator of Metal and the Wiener Werkstätte Archive, explains its decision as follows: “This jewelry artist brings the world of fashion into her work and questions the concept of beauty as it relates to design and jewelry. The intensive use of forms and materials, including large amounts of gold leaf, makes for opulent, many-layered jewelry objects.”

Every two years, the MAK Metal Study Collection mounts exhibitions featuring contemporary Austrian jewelry designers. This year, as well, the exhibited works embody a representative cross-section of contemporary Austrian jewelry art, thanks in particular to the MAK’s assumption of an exhibition originally shown at Salzburg’s Gallerie im Traklhaus. Additionally, several of the artists—including Sonja Bischur, Andrea MAXA Halmschlager, Gabriele Kutschera, Margareta Niel, Kurt Rudolf, Ina Seidl and Petra Zimmermann— are already represented in the collection of the MAK. Also on exhibit will be works by Elisabeth Altenburg, Andrea Auer, Susanne Blin, Lioba-Angela Buttinger, Agnes Czifra, Petr Dvorak, Ursula Guttmann, Beatrix Kaufmann, Doris Maninger, Martina Mühlfellner, Ulrich Reithofer, Melanie Sinnhofer and Claudia Steiner.

The Eligius Jewelry Award, Austria’s only award in the field of jewelry, is conferred by the Province of Salzburg. Apart from its singularity, it is also important in the sense that it recognizes jewelry as an art form in its own right. The award’s purpose is first and foremost to strengthen the position of the younger generation of jewelry artists. At this year’s competition, birth-years between 1960 and 1970 were most heavily represented.

Award winner Petra Zimmermann, born in Graz in 1975, lives and works in Vienna. She studied jewelry and metal at the Academy of Art and Design in Bratislava from 1996 to 1998, as well as sculpting from 1997 to 2002 at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she finished with a diploma. Solo exhibitions (selected): 2010 History Repeating II (Ornamentum Gallery, Hudson, NY), History Repeating (Galerie Biró, Munich); 2009 New Works (Caroline van Hoek Contemporary Art Jewelry, Brussels).

Agnes Czifra, born in Salzburg in 1989, studies and works in Vienna. As a jewelry artist, she is an autodidact. Her works have been included in the collection of V&V-Galerie since January of 2010.

Image: Henning Wagenbreth, 20e Festival international de l'affiche et du graphisme de Chaumont

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