Werkstattschau mit Dafi Kühne

The multi-award-winning Swiss poster designer and letterpress printer Dafi Kühne (*1982) combines contemporary graphic design with old printing techniques in an unconventional way. In addition to digital design and production tools, he uses letterpresses from the 1960s, traditional lead and wood type, laser-cut plastic plates, hand-cut and etched linoleum and even fridge magnet letters to produce his works. The "Workshop Show with Dafi Kühne" at the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur provides a broad insight into a printing universe that merges design and printing processes.

The "Workshop Show with Dafi Kühne" starts with a central question: are printed posters still useful in urban spaces in the age of digital displays? And why and with what added value should posters be elaborately produced using the letterpress process when contemporary digital printing devices now deliver high-quality reproductions at a ridiculously low price?

The exhibition takes a look at the design, technical and tactile quality of letterpress posters, which can hold their own against the results of modern printing techniques. Using a selection of Dafi Kühne's works, the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur presents both the final results and the associated design and printing processes. By focusing on design and working with new materials and experimental techniques, Kühne spans the arc from traditional letterpress printing to the present day and thus shows a possible future for letterpress printing beyond museum or nostalgic approaches.

The poster is still regarded as the supreme discipline in graphic design and visual communication. It stands out clearly from other large-format print products such as newspapers, maps, large infographics, wallpaper, etc. In contrast to these, the poster must arouse interest, exert an attraction and be able to convey a clear, reduced message in a short space of time. This struggle for attention in the public space requires concise and loud communication. The German language also provides the eponymous term for this: placativity.

In his studio, Dafi Kühne uses a mix of analog and digital tools to produce sophisticated posters for music, art, architecture, theater and film projects as well as for products. He is guided by one central restriction: "No digital PDF ever leaves the studio as a final product". Dafi Kühne prints all his posters himself using old letterpresses.

Dafi Kühne's work is characterized by the fact that the graphic composition is not created first and then executed with a printing technique, but the design only develops through the approach to the choice of material, the implementation of the graphic elements and the resulting combination possibilities and steps in the production process. The only constant in his working method and his many years of work is the printing press.

Dafi Kühne, *1982, CH
After studying Visual Communication at the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, Dafi Kühne specialized in letterpress printing at Hatch Show Print in Nashville/TN in 2008. He first came to the attention of the international letterpress scene in 2009 with his diploma project "Wood Type Now!". As a result, he was able to present the project in Italy, England and the USA in 2010 and 2011. Since 2009, he has been working full-time in his studio babyinktwice.ch in the canton of Glarus and teaches on a project basis at various universities in Switzerland, Europe and the USA. In 2019, he completed a part-time research master's degree in Typeface Design at the University of Reading in the UK.

Kühne's mostly purely typographic posters have received numerous international awards and have been shown in exhibitions worldwide. His posters can be found in public collections and archives in Switzerland, Germany and the USA. In 2016, Lars Müller Publishers published the monograph "True Print", which will be continued in fall 2024 with "Poster Cult". (Book launch: Thu, 31.10.2024 at the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur)

Dafi Kühne offers a 13-day intensive program in poster printing and typography as international summer courses for students and professionals (typographic-printing-program.com). Since 2022/23, the courses have also been held annually as satellites in collaboration with the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography ArtCenter in Pasadena/CA. In 2018-2021, he published a series of entertaining web videos entitled "The Dafi Kühne Printing Show™", which won a Swiss Design Award and the Japanese Tokyo TDC Prize in 2021.


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.