Berlin screenprints

Hubert Riedel and ZWÖLF

07/09/—17/11/24

 

The double exhibition combines posters from the completed work of the Berlin graphic artist Hubert Riedel (1948 Berlin-Friedrichshain – 2018 Berlin) with that of the Berlin graphic studio ZWÖLF, founded in 2000 and still active today.

 

Under this collective name, Stefan Guzy (*1980) and Björn Wiede (*1981), both graduates of the UdK Berlin, increasingly found their Signum in the conceptually designed typography poster. In their cultural posters, the two sensitively seek the sophisticated, graphic translation of the purpose of the message (such as advertising an art exhibition or a concert), which, moreover, often reflects the peculiarities of the poster medium, occasionally contradicting them: A large, rectangular sheet of paper is always a limited area on which the writing not only conveys information in a banal way, but creates a space of image and meaning through movement and shape.

 

Designing and working by hand at the printing table, ZWÖLF, situated in a Kreuzberg backyard, continue the Berlin district’s more than 100-year-old printing tradition in the field of screen printing. Experiments far removed from material-typical conventions have become their domain: serigraphs with toilet cleaner, bubble bath, oil, honey, nail polish, lipstick, toothpaste, molasses and modeling clay on cardboard as well as with sidewalk chalk on bitumen demonstrate their strong interest in craftsmanship, which ultimately led to the founding of the Kreuzberg hand screen printing company in 2010. In the “Hand Screen Printing Company Editions”, which have existed since 2020, Wiede and Guzy are pushing this preference for artistic screen printing by now exploring the limits of the technology in alliance with their “favorite artists”. A small selection of these productive and research-based collaborations, in which ZWÖLF now takes on the dual role of artist printer and graphic publishing duo, can be found in the corridors surrounding the machine house.

 

Hubert Riedel, who initially worked as a milling machine operator and dispatcher in heavy engineering from 1965 to 1974, designed – self-taught – all of the printed matter for the Berlin City Library as the in-house graphic designer from 1976 to 1986. From 1987 onwards he worked freelance, mainly as a poster, book and exhibition designer. In addition to his work as a graphic designer – for example for the Galerie Mitte for decades – Riedel also worked as a curator, passionately dedicated to communicating and researching the work of the German poster artist and pioneer of the Berlin object poster Lucian Bernhard (1883–1972). He brought the poster design that was contemporary during his lifetime and inspired him into his own four walls and exhibited it in the Riedel studio (Ott & Stein, Paul Brühwiler).

 

In Riedel’s poster work, which comprises a good 250 sheets, screen printing is the technical predominant method, although he rarely printed it himself. Even in his posters produced using offset printing, he imitated the unbroken color effect of screen printing by dispensing with four-color halftone printing. In his screen printing works, which have won many awards in the “100 best posters”, he created his unmistakable, concise and economical style, in which he often covered dark paper backgrounds with text-image compositions in bright colors – sometimes Lucian Bernhard, whom Riedel admires, greets him from afar in their colorfulness and objective reduction.