Artists Space

The Truth About Hollis
Stuart Bailey

Talk
September 26, 2013, 7pm

This talk centers on Bailey’s insight into Hollis’s approach to graphic design, and the impact felt on the discipline due to social and technological developments. Stemming from Hollis’s writings on the historical shift towards visual communication as marketing, Bailey expands on how the material qualities of Hollis’s work can serve as heuristics towards a deeper understanding of his discipline.

A bifold book cover. A picture of a woman singing into a microphone bleeds across the front and back cover and the title of the book is written in a blocky yellow font.
Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (Macmillan, 1980). [A bifold book cover. A picture of a woman singing into a microphone bleeds across the front and back cover and the title of the book is written in a blocky yellow font.]

In the mid-1990s, Stuart Bailey interviewed Richard Hollis for his undergraduate thesis on Modernism in the UK. He subsequently became Hollis’s assistant, working with the designer at his home over a period of two years. Bailey has since formed, with David Reinfurt, the collaborative practice Dexter Sinister, under the rubric of which they have pursued diverse design, exhibition and publishing projects including the journals Dot Dot Dot (originally founded with Peter Bilak) and Bulletins of The Serving Library (with Angie Keefer).

Stuart Bailey: The Truth about Hollis. Talk documentation, September 26, 2013, Artists Space. [A PowerPoint presentation showing various images of Hollis's approach to graphic design, with spoken commentary.]