Questions of Faith by Djordje Ozbolt
From Hauser & Wirth:
Released after his solo exhibition at The Holburne Museum in Bath (17 November 2016 – 5 March 2017) and coinciding with the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset (19 January – 7 May 2017), this title highlights Djordje Ozbolt’s recent work, reproducing the artist’s sculptures, paintings and drawings from late 2013 to early 2017.
The monograph was designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio. The clothbound cover brings together two typefaces by Georg Trump, the versatile German designer who was born on this day in 1896. The artist’s name features the static slab serif Schadow-Antiqua, while the title is set in the dynamic Trump-Mediaeval — another, quite different serif, defying the textbook rules of pairing typefaces. The contrast between the two is further increased by using caps from the former, and italics in mixed case from the latter. The combination is not exactly harmonious, but it nevertheless works fine, since both styles have a similar weight and exhibit about the same — modest — amount of stroke weight contrast. The circumstance that they come from the hand of the same designer also helps.
Schadow-Antiqua Werk (named Schadow Light in Bitstream’s digitization) would have offered an italic companion — it is actually the only style of the original family to do so — but apparently the designers wanted to establish some friction here. Gimlet, a recent reinterpretation of Schadow-Antiqua by David Jonathan Ross, comes with italic cuts for all 56 roman styles. It doesn’t maintain all the eccentricities of the original, though. The capital proportions (wide ‘Z’, narrow ‘B’ etc.) were normalized in Gimlet, and the ‘E’ with “underbite” was toned down a notch, too.
