AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Separation studio with illustrator1/9/2024 ![]() A miniature three-legged piano stands in one corner, and in another, an old, frayed dentist’s chair is being used as a magazine rack. He’s easygoing and soft-spoken when he lets you in to his high-ceilinged abode, which he shares with his partner, illustrator Sophia Martinek. He lives on Kollwitzstrasse, named after the expressionist Käthe Kollwitz. When Wagenbreth moved here following the fall of the wall, the former Communist East area was a shambolic retreat of ruined palatial homes at attractive low rents. To get into the apartment, you enter through an ornamental wooden door in Berlin’s now gentrified Prenzlauer Berg district. I’ll set the scene for Wagenbreth’s studio. It has to communicate clearly at the first moment, but it has other layers of meaning too.” “It should be easy to decipher as a form, but the content can still be complicated. Whether an everyday stamp, a large poster, or a series of songs, Wagenbreth has a resounding basic philosophy-which he says makes his work distinct from fine art-namely: Henning Wagenbreth’s studio, photo: Ina Niehoff Restless and curious, the polymath artist even plays in a band of illustrators called The Mazookas, who put on shows of folk music from Eastern Europe to West Africa and perform with a tumbledown troupe of dolls. Cry for Help, for example, is his illustrated collection of scam emails from Africa, and in recent years, Wagenbreth has also been constructing a robot called Tobot that draws its own exquisite corpses. Informed just as much by the fables of Hans Christian Andersen as he is with classic punk strips from Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s ’80s comic mag Raw, Wagenbreth’s love of traditional and comic folklore is one he combines with a fascination with modernity and technology. His striking ability to condense complex ideas into simple signs has led to him working on limited-edition German postage stamps for several years now, yet his imagination can meander fantastically, lending his riotous graphic novels a tantalizingly absurdist edge. ![]() Wagenbreth is that rare kind of graphic artist who can combine emotional storytelling with the meticulous instinct of a graphic designer, and he does this whether creating album artwork, music posters, editorials for American clients like The New Yorker, or illustrated sets for local performance artists. The view is a seemingly chaotic vaudeville, but look a little harder and order begins to take shape. I’ve never been in a studio that so clearly reveals the mind of its maker as when I visited the home office of German graphic artist Henning Wagenbreth: to navigate the corridors of his studio is to see the world through the illustrator’s eyes. Henning Wagenbreth's studio, photo: Ina Niehoff ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |