Stankowski

In the thirties, the painter, photographer and graphic artist Anton Stankowski began to establish a private archive of contact prints featuring all kinds of objects for the applied graphic sheets he created Max Dalang, the Zurich-based advertising agency. Influenced by the great designers of his age like Max Burchartz, El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters, Stankowski soon developed his own imagery in his works. His archive is full of strongly reduced, perhaps terse but often witty images of things seen from unusual perspectives. According to Guido Magnaguagno in his appreciation of these photographs, "Never before has such a poetry-laden plant like the 'poppy' been so succinctly placed into the picture frame, and nobody has ever endowed a simple 'banister' without any symbolism whatsoever with so much breathtaking, purely optical presence." Stankowski's catalog of worlds comprises thousands of negative prints. This immense reservoir first surfaced in the estate of the artist after his death in 1998: the catalogue raisonné published in his lifetime makes no mention of them. Karl Duschek, Stankowski's Stuttgart-based successor in his studio, has chosen 180 motifs from the convolute work, which now serve to close this gap.