We had one artist last week, this week I thought I would look at another: Andreas Scheiger. Artist Andreas Scheiger has created a wonderful exhibition in honour of type/lettering (call it what you will), the medium through which so many have communicated their ideas through the years. That allows us to preserve our history and separates from our pre-literate ancestors.
From his Exhibition:
"Of all the achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous. Letters, like men, have now an ancestry, and the ancestry of words, as of men, is often a very noble possession, making them capable of great things. indeed, it has been said that the invention of writing is more important than all the victories ever won or constitutions devised by man. The history of writing is, in a way, the history of the human race, since in it are bound up, severally and together, the development of thought, of expression, of art, of intercommunication, and of mechanical invention.(...) A letter should possess an esthetic quality that is organic, an essential of the form itself and not the result of mere additions to its fundamental form nor to meaningless variations of it."
When my eyes crossed this excerpt of famous type designer Frederic W. Goudy´s "The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering" (1918) suddenly letters full of life showed in my mind´s eye. Letters are organisms and typefaces are the species, all classified similar to biological taxonomy! I drafted this cognition in a chart for print and in order to prove my finding to the interested audience I took one step further. I surgically opened the letters S, Z, S, A, W and how contented I was to discover muscles, veins, tendons and bone just like the ones shared by so many living creatures.
Below are some of his wonderful sculptures that give a visceral evolution to letters.
You can see more here.
From his Exhibition:
"Of all the achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous. Letters, like men, have now an ancestry, and the ancestry of words, as of men, is often a very noble possession, making them capable of great things. indeed, it has been said that the invention of writing is more important than all the victories ever won or constitutions devised by man. The history of writing is, in a way, the history of the human race, since in it are bound up, severally and together, the development of thought, of expression, of art, of intercommunication, and of mechanical invention.(...) A letter should possess an esthetic quality that is organic, an essential of the form itself and not the result of mere additions to its fundamental form nor to meaningless variations of it."
When my eyes crossed this excerpt of famous type designer Frederic W. Goudy´s "The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering" (1918) suddenly letters full of life showed in my mind´s eye. Letters are organisms and typefaces are the species, all classified similar to biological taxonomy! I drafted this cognition in a chart for print and in order to prove my finding to the interested audience I took one step further. I surgically opened the letters S, Z, S, A, W and how contented I was to discover muscles, veins, tendons and bone just like the ones shared by so many living creatures.
Below are some of his wonderful sculptures that give a visceral evolution to letters.
You can see more here.
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