The Deutsche Plakat Museum, Museum Folkwang, Essen recently accessioned a whopping forty-nine of my posters. This includes not only work from BlackDog and Design is Play—co-designed with Angie—but also the first poster I ever designed while still in college at UCLA in 1984.

Three photos from the Museum Folkwang show some of the posters as they are being unpacked: 1) “Moloch (Capitalism Consuming His Children)” is from 1997; 2) “Tolerance” was designed by Angie and me (with lettering by John Stevens) in 2008; 3) “Republican Contract on America” is from 1995.

Nearly all of the posters were designed as self-initiated projects or pro bono. I am honored and humbled that my work over the last forty years continues to resonate. [MF]

On its way to the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich—along with seventeen other posters from BlackDog and Design is Play.

This poster advertised the services of my design studio BlackDog when I was represented by Jan Collier. (It originally ran as a full-page ad in the publication Single Image in 1994.) Working with the theme “A horse of a different color,” the design was inspired by the equine on an ancient Roman coin.

I based my BlackDog masthead on the lettering on a 1930s A&P Coffee tin. The full typeface I eventually developed—named Propaganda—was available as photolettering from Andresen Typographics in San Francisco, California.

The Kurt Schwitters quote—“All that the artist spits is art”—is included in the poster’s fine print.

In 2019 we were commissioned by the Poster Museum at Wilanów in Warsaw to design two posters about the legacy of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz as part of an international juried competition. 2019 was the fiftieth anniversary of Gombrowicz’s death.

The central motif of an eye floating against two planes is a response to Witold Gombrowicz’s observation that he always found himself “between things.” The eye is disembodied—“amputated”—the better to see and thus to “cut a path through Unreality to Reality.” Gombrowicz’s understanding of Reality includes that which is unattractive or even repugnant, a Reality suggested in the poster by the presence of a fly.

Gombrowicz describes himself as a fly in a farmyard in “A Kind of Testament.” Like a fly, Gombrowicz is drawn to the degenerate; to “subterranean” tendencies. He is also an irritant and pest. He is a provocateur.

The disembodied eye is Gombrowicz—as is the fly. Conscious of his artifice, Gombrowicz observes himself observing himself. (The poster depicts a kind of mirror.) Furthering this idea, the phrase “pół-wieczny” is also mirrored, reading from right to left.

Because of its size, prominence, and ease of legibility, one reads “Gombrowicz” before one decodes “pół-wieczny.” The act of reading left to right and then right to left creates a visual loop, a continuous circling that references the concept of “semi-eternal,” the ancillary meaning of “semicentenary” in Polish.

We were commissioned by the Poster Museum at Wilanów in Warsaw to design two posters about the legacy of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz as part of an international juried competition. 2019 was the fiftieth anniversary of Gombrowicz’s death.

The poster features a portrait of the writer Witold Gombrowicz rendered in squares. Like words joined together to form first a sentence, then a paragraph, then a story, so too do individual pixels coalesce to form an image of Gombrowicz. (“I create myself through my work,” he writes in “A Kind of Testament.”) The portrait’s left edge is purposely unresolved and imperfect. “My life is so… so… haphazard… unfinished… fluid… inadequate…”

Symmetrical and equilateral, the square epitomizes stability, immutability, and thus permanence. (“Pół-wieczny” suggests the idea of “semi-eternal.”) But while the square signals resistance to change, the pixel presents a paradoxical twist. Even as the form of the square pixel remains constant, it nonetheless facilitates the endless mutation of digital imagery—and thus of impermanence. (A contradiction that Gombrowicz would no doubt find amusing.)

The three nested squares that reveal the raw surface of the unprinted chipboard is a Japanese symbol known as a masu. (A masu is a square wooden box used for measuring rice in the 8th century when rice was a form of currency.) Masu is a homophone of the Japanese word for “increase,” and so these three concentric squares are understood as a sign of growth and abundance. We use them on the poster to symbolize the growth of Gombrowicz’s vision and influence in Poland as well as throughout the world.

“Gombrowicz” and “pół-wieczny” are printed in copper and silver, respectively. These metallic inks reinforce the theme of “semi-eternal” as precious metals are associated with permanence and incorruptibility.