Exhibition poster by Gunter Rambow, 2011
Poster Museum Wilanow, Warsaw
December 9, 2011 - February 5, 2012
The task of writing comments on the one-man show of posters by Gunter Rambow – a German designer, and a winner of countless prestigious international awards (including several ones, which he gained during various International Biennale of Posters held in Warsaw), which is being prepared right now in the Poster Museum in Wilanow, reminds somehow a reportage, written directly from a building site, where everything changes constantly and until the very last moment one cannot be sure, what will be final result of carried works.
All of that we owe the formula of “experimentation” adopted by German artist. And it doesn’t help that one may know majority of those works which will be shown within the exhibition space; they will appear reinterpreted – both, literally (as partly they were rescaled and printed in different colours – as a result of Rambow’s return to the black-and-white esthetics) – and, considering the “message” posters are normally to convey.
In other words, those works will lose direct relations with events announces by them in the past.
What remains will be the key-words (slogans) in relation to pure forms and colours, within which they have been left to exist, enriched by the context of surrounding works displayed in the vicinity. Obviously, one can say that we are witnessing some process of esthetic refining of the motives, which are being freed from their “normal”, utilitarian roles.
Thus the individual works cease to illustrate “real” themes (i.e. from “real life”) and become a kind of artist’s repository of forms and “meanings” to be used at will. Such process we can observe in Rambows’s art since the time he retired (2003) and settled in Güstrow (Western Pomerania) – a place where he owns and runs his own gallery.
Clear results of this particular way of thinking we were able to see at previous exhibition of the artist held in 2008 at National Museum in Poznan. In case of our “experiment” Rambow makes yet one step forward.
Surprisingly, German artist invited his Polish-Lithuanian friend, Stasys Eidrigevic(ius, worldwide known personality among poster designers and graphic artist, who has been famous for his experiments with poetic, space-less space (we refer to various cycles of “masks” by Stasys and his distortions of two- and three-dimentional space of his early ex-librisses).
Jacek Szelegejd
Egoisst eine Kartoffel, 1968
Othello, 1978
Haensel und Gretel, 2003
Theater posters by Gunter Rambow