Who: Stefan Soltek
Where: Klingspor Museum
What: Swiss graphic designer Dafi Kühne talks about his work
When: 20 August 2022
It’s Saturday evening. At the Klingspor Museum some 12 visitors listen to Swiss Graphic Designer Dafi Kühne. The 40 year old protagonist of the design scene has traveled from Zürich to Offenbach. He has brought not only his computer to give his presentation but also some real prints. So the audience can look at a couple of his posters in real. They are fascinating in terms of their making as well as their look. It has to do with his sense for the unlimited adventure to develop visual surprise in a field as simple as a rectangle. Kühne obviously is fully prepared to go to the limits of formal intensity. The sheet he uses may already be a big format – but Kühne also knows how to enlarge it visually by the tension he gives to his graphic compositions.
These compositions benefit from the extravagant way of making his work. Far from computer-composing techniques Kühne‘s work is based on printing, using original graphic techniques. Hand-made, that is the hallmark of his products due to his methods of preparing printing blocks, by hand setting his type and in that way giving his print the aura of inevitable directness and physical/visual presence.
I guess Kühne can claim to have established a most rare way of combining the issue of ‘a Poster‘ – nowadays usually an offset print – with that of an ‘Intriguing craft’. He demonstrates how personality can be visible in a multiplied piece of advertising which is very often thought of as being objective.
Dafi Kühne – a must-know in modern graphic design.
[Photos © Simon Malz]
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