Billy Kiosoglou and Frank Philippin, of two-man design agency Brighten the Corners, have worked with Anish Kapoor since 2009. Their first collaboration was the minimal ‘white rectangle’ website anishkapoor.com, a colour-coded system in sans serif type that lists every item in the internationally acclaimed sculptor’s long career.
Since the 1980s, Kapoor has made increasingly monumental work from a variety of materials – including wood, acrylic, slate, marble, cement, earth and metals – often using intense primary pigments. In 1991 he won the Turner Prize, and from June to October 2015 there will be a solo exhibition of his work at the Palace of Versailles, near Paris – the latest show in an annual series that has featured Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Joana Vasconcelos.
In the past five years, Kiosoglou (in London) and Philippin (in Odenwald in Germany) have forged a close relationship with Kapoor, making books and catalogues together and working on a huge book about Kapoor’s architectural installations (that as yet has no confirmed publication date). The catalogues, by contrast, are smaller and come with tight deadlines. But Kiosoglou and Philippin aim to make work that reflects the ‘process’ of Kapoor’s work.
‘The process is what we have in common,’ the designers declare, and reflections on the processes of art and design recur frequently in conversation. Brighten the Corners reject the conventions of art world publishing, dismissing the ‘super-thick artists’ catalogues’ that show page after glossy page of artworks with a full bleed photograph on the cover.
‘Design for art catalogues often aims low,’ says Kiosoglou. ‘The designer and artist are not in the same room. It is often hard to tell whether the artist is living or dead!’
Kapoor, born in Mumbai, India in 1954, is very much alive, and fully involved in every aspect of Brighten the Corners’ fastidious and adventurous print design. Based in Camberwell, South London, Kapoor is a big presence on the international art scene, a sculptor whose work can be seen throughout the world, from Kaipara Bay, New Zealand to Italy’s Pollino National Park; from Naples to Nottingham, and in many more places where his work changes the look of the landscape and soon becomes part of local culture.
Another example of Brighten the Corners’ counter-intuitive approach to catalogue design is In the shadow of the tree and the knot of the earth (2012). In this book, colour images from the London exhibition of the same name are inserted as loose, folded prints between bound pages that feature Kapoor’s preparatory monochrome gouaches. The result is dark and dense and atmospheric. These gouaches weren’t actually in the Lisson Gallery exhibition. ‘This was one of our most extreme suggestions,’ says Philippin, ‘but the gouaches show the thinking behind the show.’
Kapoor often draws preparatory sketches like these. ‘A lot of the sculptural work comes out of the drawings,’ says Kiosoglou. ‘When we go to his studio we often see sketches that he is working on. Gouaches are much more descriptive of an atmosphere … they say what the sculpture should feel like.’
