Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

Springer Publishers have sold print titles such as the Hamburger Abendblatt and Berliner Morgenpost in Germany and the magazine publishing house PGP in France. It has explained this by saying that it wants to focus more on the digital business. With such reports ringing in our ears, the very idea of founding a new print magazine sounds courageous, somehow anachronistic and almost far-fetched. Idealism is a key concept in such an enterprise, says Felix Burrichter. In 2006 the architect founded the magazine Pin-up.

Burrichter is now curator of the exhibition Paper Weight – Genre-defining magazines from 2000 to Now at the Munich House of Art. In addition to Pin-up, it presents fourteen other international magazines, to which Burrichter has given the title “genre-defining”. Thus, according to his own definition, he classifies them “as functioning as a link to a readership that is first defined by the magazine”. In the hall of the museum, each of the magazines has at its disposal a partition wall modelled on a double page, which its editors could design as they liked. Apartamento, Bidoun, BUTT, Candy, The Gentlewoman and Toilet Paper are the names of some of the selected magazines. Their range of subjects is broad – architecture, art, fashion, sex, food and cultural politics.

Many of the magazines are niche publications. Candy, for instance, published by the Spanish artist Luis Venegas, revolves round transvestism and transsexuality. And The Gentlewoman from London portrays women who do not appear in the run-of-the-mill illustrated magazines – an herb farmer, an ice cream specialist and a podiatrist.