I was invited to participate in the annual Xmas exhibition at the Design Post in Cologne. Only problem was: I couldn’t hang my prints on the walls!
The Design Post is a huge showroom for exhibiting Furniture, Vases, Clothes etc. and I was given a corner close to my fellow illustrators Katrin Stangl, Heike Herold and Ulrike Viola Henrich. The corner was equipped with a big and heavy table, some chairs and some shelves. Everything was extremely expensive and we had to put some cloth between everything, not to leave any scratches. Same was with the walls: no nails, no screws, just hanging something with a nylon thread was okay.
For me it became clear that there was now way that I would hang all my prints with thin threads so I decided to present them in a new way: I stacked them on top of each other, clipping them together on the backside, building a round tower. It worked fine and looked really nice and after putting up my surfboards, some more prints on the shelves and a big one with nylon threads on the wall, it suddenly felt quite comfortely there.
The show found a big audience, even though it was not the audience I’m used to. As illustrators (all doing prints) we felt a bit like the outsiders in a crowd of fashion, furniture and jewellry designers. But in the afternoon some more of my colleagues from cologne appeared and it became a nice meeting.
My kids visited the show as well, and I was quite happy when my daughter pointed at each picture and enthusiastically yelled: “Papa, we have the same picture. And this too. and this too….”
So my biggest fans were happy and that was the main goal;)