Eye , the international review of graphic design, is a printed magazine about graphic design and visual culture. Over nearly three decades, Anette Lenz has made work that transcends trends and technology. Profile by Jan Middendorp. Over nearly three decades, Paris-based, German-born graphic designer Anette Lenz has made work that transcends trends and technology.
Many of her clients are in the public realm. Her striking, intelligent and charming graphics reflect a deep concern for the people on the receiving end of her identities, posters and publications and the social contexts in which they experience them. Whether working in friendly co-operation with other designers and institutions, or forging a more independent and individual path, her work unites superficially contrasting qualities: her German precision and typographic perfectionism with a French taste for social significance and visual poetry.
Occupying several large rooms in the stylish Richard Meier building, Lenz designed a show that was a complex comment on the building and its city, a colourful and challenging trip for visitors and a three-dimensional visual essay about graphic design and its functions.
Designing identities she received a post-academic education in clean functionalism and then decided to look elsewhere. In she left for Paris. Then came a call from Grapus partner Alex Jordan, a German-born designer-artist. What Lenz did not know was that the collective was about to implode and had been divided into independent groups. I was in! The reaction when she presented her spotless design on paper next morning was disappointing.
You must free yourself from the grids and the cleanness. I was furious and ran out. When I came back, he looked at me with an inquiring look, and I realised he might have a point. I had been so strongly influenced by my Munich studies. Two very different worlds were colliding. And something new had to develop. Within a year Grapus was disbanded. The conflicts between its senior members had become too acute to solve.
