Workwear: Spatial and Graphic DesignWorkwear: Spatial and Graphic Design

The spatial design of Workwear is by Cookies, an architecture and design agency with studios in Rotterdam and Paris. Designer and art director Isabelle Vaverka, who works from Amsterdam, is responsible for the graphic layer. Cookies’ designers Alice Grégoire, Federico Martelli, Clément Périssé and Antonio Barone, who collaborated with Colin Keays and Edward Zammit, have tailored their choice and use of materials to the subjects of the exhibition. For the spatial design language and typography, the designers have been inspired in various ways by different art and design movements with a clear connection to the theme. The exhibition design is based on workwear’s function as a protective barrier between people and the outside world, between body and architecture. Heavy physical labour and protective clothing are at their most visible, perhaps, on building sites. Cookies translates the wood, plaster, concrete and metal we know from these environments into the setting of a museum gallery. This choice for ready-made materials in their raw state also determined the colour palette of the graphic design: the mint green of plasterboard and the natural shades of raw plywood, set off by the silver-coloured details of the metal text boards.

Nieuwe Instituut and curator Eldina Begic did not want Workwear to be the usual kind of fashion exhibition, with displays that could have come from the windows of a luxury department store. In Workwear, therefore, garments are displayed on custom mannequins. These wooden figures consist of modular elements that can be combined in various ways to make specific garments stand out. The wood is used as efficiently as possible. You can see the making process throughout the entire set-up. The multiplex boards from which the separate arms, legs, torsos and heads have been cut are reused elsewhere as a background for plasterboard information panels and as dividing walls between the various exhibition sections.

The design of the mannequins is reminiscent of the work of Russian Constructivist artists who, in the early 20th century, used geometric forms in their attempts to depict a better, modern world. The rows of workers displaying their work clothes also recall German-Dutch graphic artist Gerd Arntz, whose 1930s pictograms made social, historical and technological relationships clearly visible to ‘ordinary people’.

For the exhibition text descriptions, Isabelle Vaverka has used a geometric sans-serif typeface reminiscent of the fonts commonly used in 1920s Germany. Because every character takes up exactly the same amount of space as all the others, the font creates a ‘mechanical’ atmosphere. This aesthetic dovetails seamlessly with Arntz’s infographics from the last century, from which Workwear’s mannequins might have escaped. As with the mannequins, the lettering nods to the themes of the exhibition in several ways. Here, too, the design is a contemporary translation of an era in which ‘the worker’ symbolized a dreamed-of equal society. We see a combination of functionality, craft, and a quirky and carefully developed concept.

The pedestals and plinths are composed of fence feet, the heavy blocks of concrete or plastic that support the fencing around building sites. The result references a radical exhibition design from the past: the concrete-footed glass easels used by Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi to furnish a modern art museum in São Paulo in 1968.

The exhibition and exhibition chapter titles are written in a heavy sans-serif typeface that could almost be cast in concrete. It suggests heavy-duty materials, deceptively simple design and the importance of good visibility in hazardous working conditions.

See here for an impression of the research that inspired Workwear’s spatial designers.

Alice Grégoire, Federico Martelli, Clément Périssé and Antonio Barone started their design and architecture agency Cookies in 2016. They see their practice, in their own words, as “a catalyst for art and architecture; a polyphonic dialogue between research and production… Cookies dismembers and re-articulates the relation between art, display, curation and space, diving into projects that require a critical approach and multidisciplinary collaboration.” Cookies has collaborated with designers, art institutions and media around the world. Read more on the studio’s own website.

Isabelle Vaverka works as a designer and art director in the cultural sector. Before founding her own design studio in 2021, she worked for studios in New York and Amsterdam. Her work is characterised by a conceptual approach and distinct use of typography, colour and photography. Besides her work as a designer, she is also an art director and regularly collaborates with photographers and filmmakers. Read more on her website

In 2020-21, the Nieuwe Instituut organised Art on Display 1949-69, an exhibition about exhibiting art and the art of exhibiting. It featured a part of Lina Bo Bardi’s design for the collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), which featured a grid of more than 100 glass easels. “This form of presentation was intended to rid the museum of its sacred atmosphere,” we wrote in 2020. “Bo Bardi wanted to present artworks as objects that could be understood and experienced by everyone, including the uninitiated. This arrangement invited visitors to stroll among the works as if in a town square, with the paintings becoming characters like the visitors themselves.”

Read more about the project on the previous edition of our website.