For it’s third time the “illustratoren-festival” was held up in cologne showing more than 50 artists.
Initiated and organized from illustrators for illustrators it became a big success in the first two events in 2012 and 2014, attracting more than 2000 visitors. So the stakes were high.
Because the former venue wasn’t available anymore, the show moved to a new Place. And what a beautiful place it was: Horbach Stiftung in Cologne Südstadt is located in fully renovated industrial buildings, seperated in three main halls with walls reaching up to 6 meters.
It’s been so nice and inspirational to meet all my fellow colleagues. Meeting some of them for the third time in a group show, it felt very familiar right from the start.
For this exhibition the Illu 16 Team spend some money on new wooden walls and they were worth their money. With lots of helping hands we put them together and started hanging our work. For me that was quite a challenge. This time I wanted to show a lot of smaller prints and one or two large ones. But I didn’t do any planning on where to hang which one. So I just started by climbing up the highest ladder I could find and hang one large print as high as possible, just to see if it would look good. It looked good, so I hanged another one on the other wall and started filling up the spaces in between with smaller ones. And it worked quite well even without any planning or grid. Perhaps I was just lucky.
We were still a bit afraid that the new venue or other events on that day could mean few visitors. But we were quite wrong. The opening of the show was a sucess and the next days brought so many visitors that there was a queue up to the street from time to time.
For three days the show was opened, and I hardly managed to speak to every artist or to go to all lectures. It was just too much. And full. More than 3000 vistitors on three days. phew!
Big thanks to the organizing team who did a great job putting up this wonderful powwow of regional artists.