Thursday, November 6, 2014
6:30 – 8:30pm

Edgar Orlaineta: Graphic Design, after Alvin Lustig

Mexico City-based visual artist Edgar Orlaineta presents his artist book Graphic Design, after Alvin Lustig (2014). This edition of 18 consists of a black screen-printed box cover, seven embossed cotton pages, and a single brass-clad steel signet. Orlaineta’s text is a translation of Lustig’s pedagogical 1946 essay Graphic Design synthesized into a codified alphabet of signets. Akin to Lustig’s 1947 fabric design Incantation, Orlaineta’s visual grammar draws from hieroglyphs. However, his combination of logographs, graphemes, and symbols are printed in a typography of raised braille.

Alvin Lustig (1915-1955) was an influential American designer whose work reflected a multidisciplinary practice encompassing furniture, graphic design, architecture, and animation. Despite being virtually blind by 1954, he continued to design with the help of his wife, graphic designer Elaine Lustig Cohen, and assistants. Orlaineta’s Graphic Design, after Alvin Lustig is part of a larger project With the eye in the hand/with the hand in the eye, after Alvin Lustig’s ‘Incantation', to be presented at FL Gallery in Milan, Italy, on November 20, 2014. The exhibition considers art and design not as mutually exclusive conceptual practices, but as symbiotic, corporeal and sensory processes facilitated by the activity of our senses exploring the world.

Edgar Orlaineta has had solo projects at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara; LAXART, Los Angeles; Casa Estudio Luis Barragan, Mexico City; Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City; El Chopo, Mexico City; Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles; and Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York. His work will be included in New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America at Museum of Art and Design, New York, November 4, 2014 – April 6, 2015.

For more information, visit: 
edgarorlaineta.tumblr.com
flgallery.com