March 25–August 21, 2016
Frankfurt am Main 60594
Germany
Hours: Tuesday and Thursday–Sunday 10am–6pm
Wednesday 10am–8pm
After World War I, a unique modernization and design project that would go down in architectural history as Das Neue Frankfurt (“New Frankfurt”) got underway in the metropolis on the Main.
Yet it was a far more comprehensive undertaking that also encompassed political, social and pan-cultural dimensions and aspired towards no less ambitious a goal than to create a new city and a new society. In the exhibition New Everything! Frankfurt’s Museum Angewandte Kunst will present a systematic survey of the typography and graphic design of that era for the first time.
The exhibition will focus above all on the 1920s, while also extending the time span to the post-World War II era and into the 1980s, and will moreover be enhanced by spotlights on the vibrant world of present-day design.
The 1920s: new typography in the Philipp Albinus Collection
The starting point for New Everything! is a collection of some 7,000 items of both business and private printed matter from the estate of the master printer and typesetter Philipp Albinus, an important Frankfurt exponent of the New Typography.
Until the 1920s printed matter used primarily Gothic type forms going back to the age of the invention of printing. With the advent of the New Typography modernist design took only a few years to gain ground in the world of printed texts.
Further major drivers of this process were the Frankfurt and Offenbach foundries that produced metal type, which from a practical point of view made the Rhine-Main region the most important location for typographic innovation. The foundries marketed the new typefaces, thereby powerfully promoting acceptance of the New Typography. One such typeface was Futura, which came to be one of the 20th century’s most successful typefaces.
The post-war period
After 1945, owing in great part to the presence of American advertising agencies and German publishing houses such as Suhrkamp and S. Fischer, but also to the influence of the Kassel "poster school," Frankfurt was a hotspot of the typographic and advertising graphics activities of the time.
In the 1980s, along the Hanauer Landstrasse, a former industrial area, a kind of Creative Mile developed, with small agencies and artists’ studios. At the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach the visual communication department produced many young designers. The possibilities opened up by digital design and computer typography ushered in a new phase in the history of visual design in Frankfurt which gave less weight than before to simplicity, clarity and reduction and instead—albeit with a constructive purpose—let unsettling and confusing elements take centre stage.
The present
In the exhibition, the intensive exploration of evidence from the past is complemented by examples of contemporary design that, responding to the new urban worlds of experience that have come into being in the Rhine-Main area and Frankfurt since the 1990s, are developing new strategies and alternative approaches to typography and graphic art as design for communication.
Contemporary designers in the exhibition:
Sandra Doeller (Bureau Sandra Doeller) / Michaela Kessler (desres design studio) / Chris Rehberger (Double Standards) / hauser lacour / Eike König (Hort) / Klaus Mai (KM7) / MESO Digital Interiors, MESO Digital Services / Pixelgarten / saasfee* / Schultzschultz / Markus Weisbeck (Surface) / VIER5
Director: Matthias Wagner K
Curators: Prof. Dr. Klaus Klemp and Prof. em. Friedrich Friedl, Matthias Wagner K and Peter Zizka (contemporary design)
Presented by: Museum Angewandte Kunst
Press contact: Dorothee Maas, Julia Ditsch and Julia Quedzuweit, T +49 69 212 32828 / F +49 69 212 30703 / presse.angewandte-kunst@stadt-frankfurt.de
