Sheila Hicks. A Little Bit of a Lot of Things

This relatively small-format exhibition catalogue with a black-and-white softcover makes a striking impression with the radical choice to use only centred text, which cascades in ever-different forms and creates varying references to the artist’s textile images and sculptures. The cover, featuring a typographical design that appears rather loud in its simplicity, is followed by a restrained contents page introducing the six sections of the book: a long section of exhibition photographs, a list of works, a curator’s essay, two conversations with the artist and a biography. Following the relatively conventional image section, without any text, the different layouts using centred text begin, arranged into one, two or three columns depending on the chapter. The accompanying images are increasingly integrated until by the end they are – both numerous and small-sized – completely interwoven with the text. While the direct connections between the typography and the textile works are in certain instances rather obvious, taken as a whole they remain engaging thanks to the sheer variety. The consistent combination of a serif typeface for English and a sans serif for German also works well. The typographical treatment of numbers is particularly pleasing, as their status as numbers is called into question and they become strong visual elements: years that are split across two lines, for example, or page numbers in which the digits appear separated by spaces. Overall, it is an experimental and artistically apt design for this kind of work.

Editor
Gianni Jetzer, St. Gallen (CH)

Authors
Various

Design
Hubertus Design – Jonas Voegeli, Jana Liebe, Kerstin Landis, Zürich (CH)

Printing
Robstolk, Amsterdam (NL))

Publisher
Hatje Cantz, Berlin (DE)

ISBN
978-3-7757-5978-6