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MARKUS WEISBECK
DO THE STARS NEED A REASON TO SHINE
01.08. – 11.09.2009

Opening: Friday 31.07.2009, 6 – 9 pm
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click the picture to launch gallery

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Krome Gallery presents the first exhibition of Markus Weisbeck (*1965) who is one of the most notable contemporary designers working in corporate cultural design. "Do the Stars Need a Reason to Shine“ is his first exhibition that brings his artistic approach to image production. On large wooden panels Markus Weisbeck renders typographic images (Schrift-Bilder) of slogans and neologisms that are both poetic and nonsensical, while playing with the visual aesthetics of late ’80s and early ’90s pop culture. The texts used by Markus Weisbeck are derived from his close friend, the writer Christian Arends, whom he lived with from 1985 to 1990. After Arends’ early death in 1998, a large collection of fragmentary poetic texts was discovered on his Atari computer. Weisbeck presents these found „construction sites and ruins of word chopping“ (Petra Maisch) in the form of printed and airbrushed typographic images on wood.

Apart from paying tribute to Arends’ undiscovered creative potential, Markus Weisbeck gives the texts a visual appearance that expresses the cultural mood of the late ’80s and early ‘90s, embodied by the New Roman-tic movement for instance. Against the purely functional usage of typogra-phy, Markus Weisbeck deliberately reduces the legibility of the text in order to emphasize its literal density, and creates an emblematic structure that does not juxtapose, but merges its iconic and written elements.

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For more than 15 years Markus Weisbeck (*1965) has been working as a graphic designer. In 1997 he founded Surface, a studio for corporate and cultural design located in Frankfurt/Main and Berlin. Since 2000 he has published collaborative music projects on the label Whatness and most recently he produced an edition of iPhone applications.
Among the works of Surface are campaigns for the Forsythe Company, the German Pavilion at the 2007 and 2009 Venice Biennials, corporate design for Manifesta7, the website of the Academy of Fine Arts Frankfurt/Main (Städelschule) and a multitude of catalogue and book projects such as the "The Hospitality of Presence“ by Daniel Birnbaum (Sternberg Press, 2008). With Surface, Markus Weisbeck is internationally renowned as one of the most influential designers working today.