It is on the day one year ago that I wrote about the book fair in Leipzig and also this year I saw a bunch of inspiring books there – content-wise as well as regarding the design and production.  I spent hours admiring the nominees and winners of the yearly award »Best Book Design From All Over The World« and the presentations of the students of different German book art study programmes, find some impressions in the pictures. Another highlight was the Korean Pavillon – every single book here could have won the best book award, in my opinion!
I concluded my weekend in Leipzig with a visit to »It’s a book, it’s a stage, it’s a public space«,  a meeting of small independent publishers, where I met friends who presented their cool project »Publishing as (part time) practice«. Check it out here, I heard they will come to Berlin with it, soon.

Örnsbergsauktionen is the name of an artist operated auction house for studio produced, independent design and craft. Its creators, Fredrik Paulsen, Simon Klenell and Kristoffer Sundin, were missing a platform for contemporary, unique design in Stockholm so they initiated the first Örnsbergsauktionen during Stockholm Design Week 2012. The idea of the auction is to open up the process between idea and finished product and to reduce the distance between designer and client. Now time has come for the second edition – until February, 8th you can check out and bid on a range of beautiful and somewhat crazy objects, bypassing the commercial demands of mass production!

Sculpture by Sara Lundkvist | Glasses by Silo Studio |  Tray by August Sörenson | Necklace by Maria E Harrysson

Images: Viktor Sjödin

What started out already in 1966 as a competition for the best posters in the GDR has become a dear recurring event: The exhibition »Die 100 besten Plakate des Jahres« (100 Best Posters of the Year) is once more on display at Kulturforum at Potsdamer Platz. 53 posters from Germany, 45 from Switzerland and 2 from Austria were awarded for their outstanding design, whereof 23 of the prize-winning entries are posters designed by students.
We were great fans of the posters by the following designers: Paula Troxler for a Moby Dick theater play, Valeria Gordeew for a masked ball at Udk Berlin, Markwald & Neusitzer for an exhibition of islandic artist erró, Björn-Christian Schiebe for the Museum of Natural Sciences.
Have a look at all winning posters here or check other dates of the travelling exhibition.

We went out to see Sarah Illenbergers exhibition at voo store in Kreuzberg. Some of the exhibits apparently were done just at the same day but a lot of her work was familiar. Nevertheless it was nice to see some of the originals and the beetroot diamonds, the pomegranate and the blonde apple just made us smile!

Under this motto, the online art show »Buy Some Damn Art« every week brings a new hand-picked selection of independent original art directly to buyers. The initiator of the site, Kate Singleton, wants to offer art at affordable prices for a new generation of art buyers. Since the beginning of November, each Tuesday at noon a new show launches featuring six originals for sale from $200 to $500.

This week it is Rachel Sitkin’s turn. Her landscape paintings quite unexpectedly show surface coal and copper mines in West Virginia and Arizona.

As usual, the weather was great at the Berlin design exhibition DMY 2011. The exhibiting designers were inspired by nature, raw materials like wood, wool, hemp and concrete and sustainability can no longer be considered as a »trend«, it is a mindset that is here to stay. You don’t see very much of this in my pictures, though, my day apparently was more about colours and funny animals…

This was long overdue: Berlin-based publishing house Gestalten finally opened a shop/exhibition space! But the waiting was worth the while: Situated in Sophie-Gips-Höfe in Mitte, »Gestalten Space« spreads over more than 300 square metres and offers all the great books by Gestalten, covering everything relevant in the international design scene. Besides, you can buy selected products by designers & artists who have been previously published by Gestalten. The gallery space is inaugerated with the exhibition »Cutters Edges« displaying contemporary collages by 50 international artists.

I didn’t see the Gregory Crewdson exhibit in Germany (it’s not so often I visit Baden-Baden…) but when I entered Stockholm’s Kul-turhuset this weekend I was lucky to discover that they had a big Gregory Crewdson show on display. Especially the images in his precisely choreographed and elaborately staged “Beneath the Roses” series were impressive. Additional images from the production process provided an insight into how much planning and orchestration is needed to achieve the final results.

This weekend, I visited the book fair in Leipzig. Besides presenting an overwhelming amount of literary novelties, the fair is also dedicated to book art. At the yearly exhibition »Best Book Design From All Over The World« arranged by Stiftung Buchkunst you can admire really beautiful books. Great layout, fantastic material choices (especially the Asian people know how to work with paper), sophisticated bindings and other extra details lifted my spirits. 14 books were rewarded, check out the winners here!

Funny electricity, serially numbered doors and beautiful floors: we´ll miss all that when c/o Fotogalerie has to move out of Postfuhramt and the place gets transformed into another shopping mall! Until the 27th of March you have the chance to see their last exhibition there, a Robert Mapplethorpe Retrospective.

Series are appealing to me: You start observing your environment in a new way when you are on to something, you discover patterns and you can collect – objects, photos, texts. So it is not surprising that I enjoyed the exhibition »In love, to:« by AFF Architects at DAZ. It is part of a series with three up-and-coming architect studios telling us about their inspiration, design processes and methodology – their »Formula X«, quite simply. AFF’s formula is influenced by objects and images from their past and present, things they love and like to surround themselves with.

The exhibition »Welt aus Schrift« (translated as “World as Words”) at Kulturforum on Potsdamer Platz takes you on a journey through the development of typography during the 20th century. Posters, books, magazines, invitations, stationery, restaurant menues, shop signs… there are so many places where typography becomes a part of our every day life. Here more than 600 of such examples are on display which outstandingly represent the style of their time and revolutionary turning points. A lot of interesting details are to be explored and inspiring styles to be found and it is amazing that many designs still feel very modern. For all of you that cannot come to Berlin until the 16th of January, there is a catalogue which includes almost all exhibits as well as some deepening essays.

I spent a day at the New Museum this winter. There is so much on display that you easily feel overwhelmed, so I found it helpful to concentrate on some beastly charming details…
By the way, there was no queue time at all, everything seemed back to normal after David Chipperfield’s much talked-about remodeling of the building.

Thank you everyone for spending a cosy sunday afternoon with us!

This sunday we´ll celebrate  a relaxed advent afternoon with an exhibition in our office. Work of the following artists will be exhibited:
Casey McGonagle
Benne Ochs
Franziska Sinn
Chelsee Ivan
Jeff Luker
Irina Rozovsky
Lars Borges
Delaney Allen

The museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden combines the two american artists Duane Hanson and Gregory Crewdson in the exhibition »Unheimliche Wirklichkeiten«. Each in his own media, they deal with reality in an irritating way: Crewdson creates elaborate sets in which he freezes weird moments of pseudo-reality and Hanson builds hyperrealistic life-sized clothed fiberglass figures. Might be an interesting combination, there is time until the 6th of march 2011 to find out.

You don’t always have to choose the sunny South to get a rewarding break from Berlin’s November rain. Last weekend I went to Helsinki and once more the city and its friendly inhabitants took me by storm. You get the Scandinavian feel but combined with an Eastern twist. The city’s architecture varies from cozy wooden suburbs to monumental soviet style buildings. Helsinki also offers great shopping with loads of design, both new and vintage (check out the Design District), unfortunately it was All Saints’ Day so we ended up with window shopping only. It is very convenient that most of Helsinki’s sights and places of interest are within walking distance, so we continued to the Kiasma museum to see an exhibition with the works of Damien Hirst and his British contemporaries. But to be honest, the thing I almost miss most when I leave Helsinki is the dark rye bread. You really should try this and other traditional Finnish food at Sea Horse, a snug restaurant with original wooden interior and wall paintings from the 1930s. Go for the real classics like crispy fried Baltic herrings or Scandinavian hash.
Hyvää ruokahalua/Enjoy your meal!

When we visited Tate Modern in the beginning of this month, the museum’s Turbine Hall was impressive, but empty. Now it is filled, namely with 100 million sunflower seeds. They are part of an installation by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and though they look realistic are they in fact hand-crafted in porcelain. 1600 workers individually sculpted and painted every single seed husk in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen during the last two years. This gets your mental arithmetic going – to make a long calculation short, the production of Ai Weiwei’s piece took about 6 million hours. This is quite a number just as the millions of seeds are a powerful sight. Even on a distance Weiwei’s installation makes me  think about what role work plays in our lives, about the „Made in China” phenomena and individualism in a society like China. You are no longer allowed to walk on the seeds (this caused health-damaging dust – here you got something more to think about…), but anyhow I would love to see the installation in real.
Photos: Tate Photography, Johan Wirfält

As our hairdresser moved to London we took the occasion to follow her and get a haircut at Radio Hair Salon plus some inspiration. It was a great trip, apart from meeting our friends, highlights were staying nearly a day in Tate Modern, afternoon tea at the National Portrait Gallery, Fish and chips at Rock and Sole Plaice. A visit at Fortnum & Mason was a must, not just for high quality tea & marmelade shopping but for enjoying their beautiful packaging.

Lars participation in the group exhibition inter.cool 3.0 at Ruhr 2010 led to a trip to the Ruhr region. We went to the opening and at the following weekend we took in everything the European Capital of Culture had to offer. From  »A star is born – Photography and rock since Elvis« at the museum Folkwang in Essen to the SANAA museum showing all famous Ruhr photographers from the Bechers to Gursky in one spectacular building and the Zeche Zollverein in Essen it was a real cultural treat!