recent graphic design

This presentation shows recent graphic work by relatively young designers and design studios.

It includes posters by the already somewhat better-known designers M/M (Paris) and the New Yorker James Victore. In addition there are animations by the Dutch designers Luna Maurer, Rogier Klomp and Blammo TV.

M/M Paris
Beginning in 1996, the M/M (Paris) studio (Mathias Augustijniak and Michael Amzalag) gained recognition with designs for the Breton city of Lorient. M/M’s theatre posters in the Muppy format are striking. The photography often fills the image and the typography seems to be without symmetry. Since 1998 this typography has increasingly taken on the character of drawing. Together with Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, M/M made the video clip Hidden Place for the Icelandic singer Björk. In addition, M/M has worked for and with fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. Here the Stedelijk is showing eleven recent Muppy posters, including Alien Seasons (2002) for Philippe Parreno, printed in Day-Glo ink. It is joined by another two posters from the 2000-2002 period, for the films Annlee in Anzen Zone and Witness Screen/Ecran témoin. The poster Annlee: No Ghost just a Shell is also exceptional, with its challenge to Shell’s claim to ownership rights for the image of the scallop shell.

James Victore
The posters by James Victore (New York) have nothing to do with a compromise culture. They are often hard and direct. The wildly drawn letters come across as almost aggressive: their rough contours suggest they have been scratched into the image. Victore’s posters often have a political charge (Stop Bush, 2002) or protest human injustices. His poster for The School of Visual Arts in New York, where he also teaches, is a sampler of typically hand-written lettering which reminds one of graffiti. The bodies of the characters are used to render the text in a tattoo idiom. Victore does not avoid cliché; on the contrary, he is prepared to quote clichés lovingly. He has worked for Amnesty International and MTV, but also for Moët & Chandon, and received an Emmy award for television animation.

Rogier Klomp, The Goatmen Act, 2004
Rogier Klomp made his film The Goatmen Act in 2004 as his graduation project for the Design Academy in Eindhoven. The project began as a newspaper, but Klomp later decided to transform this into animation. With the aid of authentic images plucked from the internet, the film takes on a documentary character, as an investigation of a conspiracy theory. The focus is the moon landing of July 21, 1969. Klomp analyses the newspapers of this period: was this a Hollywood-staged moon landing, or not?

Luna Maurer, Grey Movie, 2004 (3 min.)
Luna Maurer is showing her 2004 animation Grey Movie. It visualises the concept of ‘rhizome thinking’, derived from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The point of departure for Grey Movie is a screen of black and white dots. One dot shifts in each frame. Forms become visible in changing patterns, accompanied by the music of Fugue 33 from J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, as performed by Glenn Gould.

Blammo TV, Rez, 2004
Rez is a DVD of the computer game of the same title, produced by UGA/SEGA. The DVD was put together by Blammo TV in cooperation with the Graphic Design Department of the Stedelijk Museum. Rez is an example of the innovative game design specially for Xbox. The main element in the game is not so much a matter of winning or losing; strikingly enough, it is rather the construction and expansion of the game itself. The initially schematic structure is gradually developed, and the same is true for the music. In this way, the player is enabled to influence the graphics and sound for him or herself.