Located in the central borough of Berlin is the unsuspecting, quirky graphic-design studio and gallery Bongoût. The owners, Christian Gfeller and Anna Hellsgård, have long been infatuated with music, so the prospect of producing music-inspired visual art came naturally to them when they began collaborating on graphic-design projects in 1995.
“When Anna and I first met,” Gfeller reminisces, “we both owned massive vinyl collections. Over time, and due to several house moves, the non-vital part of the collection was cleaned – but we still own a few thousand records. Music plays a very important part in our lives – not just the music itself, but the whole cultural surrounding.”
The two designers are particularly fond of obscure punk, noise, lo-fi recordings, black metal, world music, and electronica. These eclectic influences are clearly discernible within Bongoût’s artwork. The duo has created posters and album covers for a diverse set of genre-defying clients like Black Mountain, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, and PJ Harvey.
The posters are generally multi-color prints that contain a mixture of animal-monster-human hybrids – creatures ecstatic with motion and lividly trying to escape off the page. The accompanying text holds similar attributes. It varies from straight-forward sans-serif typefaces to outrageous, psychedelia-inspired lettering scrawled beside the image and squeezed into every available crevice of the design.
Following their successful collaborations, Gfeller and Hellsgård eventually founded Bongoût’s design studio and silkscreen workshop. In 2008, Bongoût grew when the duo joined forces with Alain de la Mata, and Bongoût Gallery was born.
The gallery showcases the print-media works of the owners as well as collaborations with other talented artists and designers, striving to “build bridges that expand past the confines of contemporary art.” Focusing primarily on silk-screened posters and limited-edition artists books, Bongoût’s work has been collected and displayed at prestigious institutes and galleries such as Harvard, Yale, MoMA, and the State Museum of Berlin.
While screen-printing, the partners often use materials such as gouache, spray paint, tape, stamps, or whatever comes to mind – such as human hair or pieces of recycled film. “Our role as designers is to push some boundaries and explore new fields,” Gfeller says, “[but] we are not interested in crafty, laborious challenges for their own sake.”
Bongoût remains undeterred by the lack of poster artists within Germany, and the space doesn’t mind being one of the only alternative screen-printing shops around. Excited to see younger artists interested in printing posters, Gfeller and Hellsgård hope to see the DIY culture within Berlin reemerge, and they’re happy to promote it in unconventional ways.
Aside from music-related artwork, Bongoût currently is focusing on a series of large-scale prints inspired by the chapters of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The prints vary in subject matter from figurative to graphic and abstract visual elements. Moreover, the owners are enthusiastic about the diverse upcoming shows that they will curate within their gallery space – hand-painted movie posters from Ghana, followed by a two-month stint as a custom guitar shop in 2011.
“[We’re] not the typical white cube,” Gfeller jokes.