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.
The Bonniers Cook Book from 1960 is the Swedish Holy Grail of cooking – everybody’s granny had it. It is a culinary and visual treasure and you can spend a lot of time learning how to modernize your kitchen (to a middle of the 20th century standard), interpreting diagrams about how to blend sauces and admiring table decorations. I even discovered a piece of Rörstrand chinaware I have at home! The cover art is by Bo Lassen, unfortunately I do not know other works by him.
We just discovered the vietnamese artist Diem Chau and became huge fans of her carved crayon figures and porcellain plates with silk thread hair. As she puts it it´s all about The pleasure of tiny things!
Thanks to ACHTEINHALB for the great opening! We were also exited to see the new visual identity we designed for them applied in the store.
»To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.« This is Google’s idea behind its vast Street View project that allows us to take digital promenades in many cities, from Aberdeen to Adelaide and from Zürich to Zaragoza. On The Nine Eyes Of Google Street View Tumblr, artist Jon Rafman has collected the most amazing Google Street View moments that were captured totally randomly.
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!
In search of inspiration in the field of production we paid a visit to Stein + Lehmann bookbindery. Mr. Stein himself took us on a really interesting tour through the manufactory and showed us the possibilities of modern bookbinding.
It was big fun to watch this highly energetic lady Barbara Panther and Caribou made us happy with their complex and euphoric sound storms! Thank you electronic beats and happy 10th anniversary.
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
We had a great evening with our friends celebrating the fact that MAVEN found a new home sky-high right in the middle of Kreuzberg. Thank you all for coming!
Heaven Over Kottbusser Tor.
My latest font purchase is the STRANGELOVE designed by Marcus Sterz of viennese typefoundry FaceType. It is inspired by Pablo Ferros original title-lettering of Stanley Kubrick’s movie »Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb«.
To promote the »Bildungsmeile Wutzkyallee« we dyed building bricks in the corporate colors and initiated great building activities with children at the school fair together with empirica.
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.
This book with its vast collection of the works by American illustrator Charley Harper (1922-2007) is a bombproof spirit-lifter. No matter if you’re young or old, you can spend hours flipping through this treasure of abstracted geometric forms, energetic paintings, amusing drawings and an overall whirl of colors. Harper, who called his style for »minimal realism«, is best known for his highly stylized illustration of birds and wildlife, but this book gives you a wider insight and also includes the pieces Harper created for advertising and promotional art, his murals and illustrations for Ford Motor Company’s lifestyle magazine, Ford Times. There’s an affordable edition of this weighty tome out there, so feel free to enter Charley Harper’s universe.
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!
Out now is the latest issue of The Electronic Beats Magazine with one of my favourite covers so far, picturing a really romantic german shepherd photographed by Mikael Kennedy. Reactivating quill and ink and trying to perform some serious handwriting for the opener pages illustrations felt quite nostalgic! If you want to have a look at the whole issue: Klick! And also past EB issues: Klick!!
After this years holiday in Sweden I was obsessed with making my own crispbread. And to my surprise it is neither complicated nor do you need a special oven to get a nice and crunchy result. Try with different seasonings like anise, dill seeds, caraway, fennel seeds, sesame…
Womans Wear Daily has published a list of Pantone Colors that fashion designers used most for their 2011 spring collections.
1. Honeysuckle ( 15,5%)
2. Regatta (14,8%)
3. Coral Rose (14,0%)
4. Beeswax (13,3%)
5. Peapod (10,3%)
Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, refers to exotism when she analyses the color scheme, the chosen colors are supposed to give people a lift in times of concern about the economy and life in general. Also WWD relates to escapism: The designers use colors from far-away countries to make the consumers forget their everyday problems. For more color psychology, even regarding the men’s collections, click here.
