Exhibition posters: the show, reduced to one sheet

An exhibition poster has an impossible job: announce a show, carry the artist's name, give the place and the dates, and still be worth looking at after the show has closed. The best ones solve it by treating the whole sheet as one graphic decision — a single letterform, a single shape, a single colour doing all the work.

That is why they age well. Nothing in them depends on fashion, and the printing was usually supervised by the designer rather than the marketing department.

The Bauhaus made the template

The school's own announcements are the reference point: heavy sans-serif lettering set on a diagonal, red and black on cream, no photography and no decoration. The Weimar sheet, the Zurich print and the later Berlin-era announcement show the same brief answered three times, each one a different arrangement of type and rule. The context sits on the Bauhaus page.

What is in this collection

• Museum retrospectives — Klee at MoMA, the Matisse retrospective, Matisse's cut-outs and Kandinsky.
• Paris galleries — Picasso in Paris, Léger's Galerie sheet, Hantaï, Rodin at Pully and Soulages.
• Living artists and later shows — Kusama's Paris show, the Morris centenary and Stockholm's own exhibition.
• Off the gallery track — the Montreux jazz bill, a natural history museum and Munch.

How to choose one, and how to hang it

Read the sheet from two metres away before you decide. If the name is legible and the graphic still holds, it will work above a sideboard; if the interest is only in the small print, it belongs where people stand close — a hallway, a kitchen, the wall by the door.

Exhibition posters are typographic, so they suit rooms with something to compete against: bookshelves, a radiator, a low ceiling. On a totally bare wall they can look like a note pinned up. Two of them side by side work if they are from the same school or the same designer; four need a strict grid and identical frames.

If you prefer paintings to announcements, the classic category covers the same artists as pictures; for the printed music tradition, there is music.

Sizes, paper and delivery

Pigment print on 210 gsm Hahnemühle paper, sizes from 30×40 to 70×100 cm plus A3 and A2. Frame not included. Orders leave the studio within 24 business hours and arrive in 3–5 working days inside the EU, in a tracked tube.