The exhibition will explore their collaboration on projects such as the development of the Walker typeface created by Carter. M/M is a Paris-based group co-founded by Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak in 1992. To have started with music projects, they have forged enduring collaborations with the fashion houses: Balenciaga, Jil Sander and Yohji Yamamoto and were recently appointed creative directors of Paris Vogue.

Yohji Yamamoto SS98 catalogue. Photo: Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, Set design: M/M (Paris)

M/M’s work is artful and original. They mix a very traditional sense of dense pictorial story-telling with a wild sensibility. Their creations are highly-strung, neurotic and haunting. Their work for Yamamoto is elegant and memorable, slyly mixing restraint and excess. Defiantly unusual, they beguile you with a sense of impending insanity. Beautiful art direction and photography, deft graphic nuances, driven by off-stage narratives. As M/M say themselves, “Design is a conversation and they’re always waiting for an answer.”

Trained in the Swiss school of typography, Müller+Hess describe their work as a sophisticated subversion of its traditions. From their Zurich studio, Beat Muller and Wendlin Hess combine self-published projects, like Grenzwert magazine, with work for the Basel Art Fair and Kaskakondensator art space.

Identity for Rotterdam as European Capital of Culture, 2001 © Müller+Hess

Muüller+Hess: The love/hate relationship with typographic tradition is the engine of this work. The application of predetermined systems to complex design environments, and the consequent joy in “found” or “accidental” results is very spirited despite the initial sense of austerity and reserve. All their work is intelligent and communicative. The recycling and overprinting of student leaflets and administrators business cards is a wonderfully efficient and poignant way of stressing how time passes and change occurs. Their final result is a graveyard of ink describing a very human sense of time, change and impermanence. The modus operandi of over-printing becomes a ritualistic mantra which resonates against the formal structures inherent in the typographic composition.

Mevis & Van Deursen is an Amsterdam-based design team co-founded by Armand Mevis and Linda Van Deursen. As well as creating Rotterdam’s identity as European Capital of Culture, they have worked for the Netherlands Design Institute and for the Stedelijk Museum and Muziektheater in Amsterdam.

ABCD E-MAGAZINE for Viktor & Rolf, Mevis + Van Deursen

Mevis and Van Dursten: Again I was struck by intelligence and brevity. They excel in the process of editorial readjustment, taking delight in the journey itself as well as the destination. On display here were cinematic books that seem to obsessively catalogue and digest ephemera, always seeking the story as a means of explaining something. They probe the relationship between author/designer and audience deftly and assuredly, seeking to create meaning from isolated fragments of experience.