On the top floor of an old textile factory in the Swiss Alps sits one of the remaining working examples of a Grafix GX4N printing press – a huge industrial beast manufactured in 1960s West Germany. Made from solid steel, it weighs in at 3.2 tonnes. Its owner is Dafi Kühne, a Swiss designer of large-format typographic posters that blur the lines between advertising and art. Kühne is revered by fans of the form, which is why a new book collecting some of his best work is called Poster Cult.
As John Peel once said of The Fall, Dafi Kühne posters are always different, always the same. They are playful, they are cryptic. They inform and they thrill. They make you stop still in the street or the gallery. They jump off the wall and into your head. The artist says that a typical Kühne poster “cannot exist… for me, the personal style of good designers does not lie in individual works but in the constant curiosity and search for new technical and visual possibilities.”
In a digital world where poster design comes by committee (and even now by AI), where files are emailed to clients and appear on digital screens rather than traditional billboards and where vinyl stickers have replaced paper and paste for smaller runs, Kühne champions the self-contained and the analogue. He is involved in every stage of his posters’ creation, giving himself three days on each master design, rooting around in cases of metal type salvaged from long-gone printers, selecting and mixing inks and introducing this alchemical assemblage to the Grafix GX4N. An edition of hundreds of posters can require as many as 25 passes through the machine. The result, generally, is magical.
In her introduction to this remarkable book, Angelia Lippert of New York’s Poster House museum writes: “I’ll never forget landing in Zürich last summer and seeing dozens of copies of Dafi’s poster for the exhibition Repair Revolution lining the city’s streets. In the following weeks, I watched as copies slowly disintegrated in rain, bleached by the sun – and even in their various stages of destruction, they were sublime. I don’t think anything by Ogilvy and Mather can do that.”
Poster Cult is published by Lars Müller Publishers
