Poster, Every Thing Design,

2009

It would be hard to imagine a simpler or bolder poster design: a vegetable peeler, designed in 1936 and produced from 1947 by Alfred Neweczerzal (1899–1959), was used to promote an unprecedentedly broad-based 2009 exhibition of all four collections at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. In this context, the legendary kitchen utensil, a symbol of thrifty, democratic Switzerland, was a design classic avant la lettre.
Dutch graphic artist Irma Boom designed not only the poster but the exhibition catalog, placing the peeler on its cover. Numerous objects are presented in full-page illustrations and associative sequences. They invite us to take a new look at utensils and objects from our everyday lives, as the exhibition title suggests. The aesthetics of Boom’s poster are reminiscent of the 1940s Object Posters created by the Basel School, which deployed oversized images of banal household products, thus imbuing them with magical sensuality. (Bettina Richter)