For over 15 years now, we made sure that we were always making personal work alongside what we’ve been commissioned for. It’s a way for us have the space to experiment, create and fine-tune our visual language, as well as to collect a solid, representational body of work. We often collaborate with other artists and designers and these exchanges keep us sharp and the work fresh. We love how these projects force us to explore and trust the unknown. We’ve participated in countless group shows and solo exhibitions to date, and the energy we get from them is as strong and pure as it was when we just started.
We always look for novel and unconventional solutions to the trickiest design problems. This is well documented in our work with corporate identity, logo design and layouts. We are very happy that we have strong, long-term relationships with many of our clients and that we get to develop, polish and reinvent work for them over long periods of time. But we are also open to one-off jobs.
We love combining playful typography with illustrations. It’s not only one of our main strengths as artists and designers, but it could just as well be the key defining element of our personal style.
Since day one, we’ve been harnessing “analog” techniques – choosing the hand-made and physical over the purely digital. We are constantly creating new techniques and evolving the tried and tested. We often mix clean, disciplined design with a human touch and pinch of “looseness”, to create a beautiful tension. And we always try to sneak in a bit of humor into everything.
Since the very beginning of our operation as an art and design studio, we’ve been taking our work beyond the confines of a canvas and applying it to “space” through installation work and set design. Our installations literally bring our paintings to life by turning them into an array of physical objects that interact with the specific character of the space they inhabit. The difference being is that as a viewer you can walk through the painting and look at it from multiple perspectives.
We love to be challenged by large scale projects. It’s great to see our work magnified like that and in a visual dialogue with surrounding architecture. When we work with murals, we feed on the unique nature and context of the individual location. Our paintings are very often abstract or a mixture of abstract and figurative elements. We love playing around with perspective, strong contrasts and colors.
We love physical objects! The texture of paper, the smell of the ink, the weight of a book or a stack of fliers is where it’s at. We nerd out over the choice of paper and different printing techniques. We especially love small runs where we get to do something special and unique. We also thrive on reinventing layout formats for magazines. We’ve even found ways to make in-flight magazines come to life. We have a lot of fun with this stuff. We build small sets in our studio and work off-line as long as possible so that we can create processes that ensure original solutions. We’ve figured out that the right arrangement of products combined with strong ideas and a good context are a perfect recipe for a clever editorial.
The adoptability of our style and the versatility of the techniques that we utilize allow us to work with a huge variety of clients and products. We feel at home with action sports utilities, just as much as we do with DIY objects. Because we draw so much inspiration and energy from music, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to design packaging, merchandise and even fabrics for musicians. We have dozens of snowboards to our name, we’ve painted cars, built huge mock ups of pens, designed dadaist furniture and even built double-decker planes out of skateboards. In short, we’ll find ourselves in any project, as long as we feel it.
Over the last few years, we’ve been getting a lot of teaching and workshop requests, and that’s a good thing, because we love working with kids and teaching in general. We’ve been very active in the Multi-Media-Art department at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg – teaching “illustration in Space”, for over 6 years now. We were also asked to give many one-off workshops and presentations at different universities all over Germany and abroad. Our key focus is helping children, teenagers, students and, on occasion, even managers to tap into the joy of creating things. We help them see their projects through to the end and achieve results. This type of work is always full of surprises and energy and we learn as much from our students, as they do from us. When we work with companies we shift the focus to strengthening the team spirit and to finding creative solutions to daily challenges that they might facing in their particular field.