Jetzt Gerd Arntz
Mike
A double act of wit, beginning with its own title: 'Jetzt Gerd Arntz' puns on the German 'jetzt geht's' — 'now we're off', here we go — by swapping the verb for the name of Gerd Arntz (1900–1988), the German modernist woodcut artist who, working with the sociologist Otto Neurath in Vienna from 1928, designed the roughly four thousand stark little pictograms of Isotype (the International System Of Typographic Picture Education), the visual language that taught the twentieth century to read statistics as pictures and gave the world the ancestor of every airport sign and toilet-door silhouette since. Mike's screenprint is a love letter to that legacy: hundreds of tiny Arntz-flavoured glyphs — figures, bottles, machines, little red-and-green icons — marshalled into ranks until, from a step back, they resolve into clean, confident lettering. Close up it is a teeming inventory of modern life; far away it is a single legible word, a crowd of nonsense agreeing, briefly, to behave. It rewards both the squint and the stride, held behind glass in a slim black frame whose tastefully cracked pane only sharpens the joke — a sly philosophical machine about how meaning assembles itself out of multitude, and a wink to the quiet Cologne radical who proved that an icon, drawn plainly enough, can say more than a paragraph ever could.
- Medium
- Screenprint (B1)
- Framing
- Cheap plastic frame with tastefully cracked glass
- Artwork size
- 700 mm × 1000 mm
- Framed size
- 730 mm × 1030 mm
