Topic:

Grandparents’ Family History Is Contemporary History

Brief description:

Illustration and design of a story about your grandparents (or your grandmother or grandfather only), their life, their work, their time. Production of a booklet of 16 pages, portrait format A5. Design of the inside pages and cover design. We will discuss which stories to choose and how they could be told. What were the dreams of your grandparents when they were young? What was the reality? What were the expectations of their society? Which challenges did they face? How did they find their way? We will practice how text and image can be combined, how stories can be drawn and how we can find images. Workshop participants will be asked to collect stories about their grandparents in advance. Because a whole life cannot be depicted on 16 pages, small episodes from their lives can also be told.

Participants are asked to interview their grandparents and parents before the workshop and to bring along their personal stories, whether funny or sad. If there are photos, either the originals or reproductions should also be brought along.

Biography:

Born 1962 in Eberswalde in the former East Germany, Henning Wagenbreth studied from 1982-1987 at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee. Since then he works mainly as an illustrator who does the graphic design for his products himself, designs his own typefaces and understands manual and industrial printing techniques as an important part of his design process. Wagenbreth lives in Berlin, but lived in Paris and San Francisco too. He likes to illustrate and design books, posters, newspapers and magazines, in sizes between postage stamps and giant hangers, between commissioned jobs and his own art projects, between single original drawings and paintings and mass produced objects. From time to time he undertakes detours into animation film and theater. With the band »The Mazookas« he ventures into the area of visual storytelling and music.

Wagenbreth is known internationally for his expressive visual language. Besides his work as an independent graphic designer and illustrator, he has also been active as Professor for Visual Communication at the Universität der Künste in Berlin since 1994. In 2000, the Stiftung Buchkunst honoured him with their prize for the “world’s most beautiful book”, and his poster designs continue to garner him awards. Wagenbreth has developed numerous exhibitions, including in Berlin, Paris, New York, Istanbul, Lucerne, Naples and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. For one of his latest exhibitions »Transit-Zones« in 2019, the Kunstbibliothek Berlin has drawn on around 80 works by Wagenbreth from three decades – ranging from stamps to design drawings to oversized silkscreened posters. In return the illustrator was invited to choose 40 objects from the excellent graphic design, architecture, book art and photography collection of the Kunstbibliothek to set them into a dialog with his own work. Additionally the »Tobot Tower«, a compelling wood block architecture of about 1300 pieces designed by Wagenbreth expanded into space with powerful colours, words and patterns.