Eine vs. Drez

on view from 25th of march to 30th of april

While the works of the two artists, who are simultaneously opening their exhibitions at the kArton Gallery, share in common typography and popular thematic, they both interpret these in their own unique style. 
Eine and Drez are independent graphic designers for whom street visuality is more than mere inspiration: they have also been producing public art. 

Eine is referred to by the international press as the “London letter man”, who approaches the phenomenon that is street art from a whole new angle. He initially began his career in art as a traditional graffiti artist, but soon began working with archaic, printed antiqua letters. He used these to decorate the shutters of shops in his neighbourhood, transforming the East End – during lunch hour and after closing time – into a colourful alphabet book and filling the hearts of 21st century, keyboard-punching Londoners with nostalgia. 
The gigantic, coloured reproductions of tiny alphabetical images, which we encounter hundreds of times a day, affect us with the force of the new, just as they did when we were first guided into the mysteries of reading and writing as schoolchildren. Eine also uses photos of his shutters to makes montages, reproducing his messages with a simple scrabble-like mechanism. In addition to all this, he also experiments with further developing some other classical fonts, crossing them with images and, in his latest works, with press photos from English history.    
He has continued his shutter project around the world from London to New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Paris and Copenhagen. By doing this he has created his own font and by montaging the photos.

  

While Eine insists on “handwriting” and treating traditional letter shapes as unique images, Drez creates his composition of signs by applying ever newer fonts. We can come across his works – publications, websites and logos of companies and art institutions – every day. What’s more, we are always likely to encounter young people wearing shirts or hats with Drez’s logos printed on them. Pieces from his repertoire of symbols often adorn skate- and snowboards as well. With his compositions, he is an acknowledged member of a generation of graphic designers who grew up in a world of advertisements and logos and who developed their own language of communication based on this world.

  

The “postmodern heraldic” represented by these two artists proves that not only advertisements and graffiti can appear in public spaces in the form of signs (although it is an indisputable fact that well-distinguishable works are also to some extent self-advertisements) and that the boundaries of graphic design and visual art are becoming increasingly blurred.

Curator: Bianka Zsigó