Schaumainkai 17 60594 Frankfurt am Main www.museumangewandtekunst.de 1 / 4 Press release Frankfurt am Main, 30 Mar. 16 Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show 23 April – 25 September 2016 Press conference: Wednesday, 20 April 2016, 11 am Opening: Friday, 22 April 2016, 7 pm; from 10 pm: Happy After-Show Party Stefan Sagmeister is a graphic design superstar who lives in the U.S. In The Happy Show he will present the results of his ten-year investigation of happiness. Following venues in North America, Paris and Vienna, his successful show will now be on view in Germany for the first and only time: from 23 April to 25 September 2016 at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main. What makes us happy? Can happiness be trained? Stefan Sagmeister, who closes his New York studio once every seven years for an extended break, embarked on a personal search for happiness and carried out various experiments on himself in order to find out the most effective way of increasing his individual sense of happiness. He tried meditation, concentration and relaxation techniques, underwent cognitive behavioural therapy and took mood elevators. He supplemented the results of these experiments with socio-scientific data provided by the psychologists Daniel Gilbert, Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt, the anthropologist Donald Symons and prominent historians, thus placing his findings in a greater context. In a playful and intriguing manner, Sagmeister processes his research on happiness in highly emotional informational graphics, fascinating headlines, prints, amusingly instructive videos, films, installations and sculptures, thus providing the Happy Show visitors access to his way of thinking. Against a bold background of black and yellow, his works flood an entire floor – more than 1,000 square metres – of the Museum Angewandte Kunst and also spill over into the building’s lifts, ramps and service rooms. Stefan Sagmeister sums up his personal maxims of happiness and life (originally excerpts from his diary) in catchy slogans, which he then ‒ with unashamed pleasure and exuberant creativity ‒ turns into fascinating text-images. His experiments with typography are entirely unique: he forms letters from jello shaking in slow motion, has Balinese dancers perform entire sentences in ingenious choreographies, inscribes naked bodies, composes messages with bananas, eggs or blobs of whip cream, etc. Sagmeister addresses a colourful spectrum of parameters for happiness: what role is played by, for example, religion, money, marriage and sex? What makes you happier: surfing in the Internet or reading a newspaper? Many of the statements made in the show come as a surprise: whereas children, for example, are not guarantors for happiness, it turns out that marriage is. Money has only limited capacity to make someone happy; from an annual income of around 80,000 dollars upward, the happiness curve no longer rises. 2 / 4 Pr e s s e i n f o r mat i on Frankfurt am Main, 29.03.2016 He moreover wanders through the building with a felt-tip pen, embellishing the museum’s walls, railings and toilets with handwritten remarks in which he comments on himself and the world with subtle humour and a tongue-in-cheek outlook ‒ with the typical Stefan-Sagmeister blend of amusement and reflectiveness that hits the nail on the head. A visit to The Happy Show, however, is by no means limited to passive viewing. On the contrary, here happiness becomes a collective matter. In various interactive installations, for example, the visitors are questioned and/or invited to participate both mentally and physically. They have the opportunity to draw cards with instructions for happiness - promising tasks, are called upon to take money out of a receptacle and themselves contribute 20 cents, which roll through the museum on a marble run, changing owners in the process. Sagmeister’s favourite candy is served on silver platters. One of the show’s main messages is that movement and activity are a key to happiness. Numerous exhibition objects call for action on the part of the visitor, for example a bicycle that serves as a motor for huge neon signs: only he or she who pedals hard enough is rewarded with Sagmeisterian happiness slogans that light up on the wall. A typographic installation made of pieces of sugar encourages visitors to laugh by shining all the more colourfully the heartier the laugh. At the end of the show, gigantic gumball machines form an apparatus by means of which the visitors can rate their degree of happiness on a scale of 1 to 10 by pulling a piece of chewing gum out of the respective tube. At the same time, the apparatus visualizes the collective degree of happiness of all visitors to the exhibition until that particular moment. A captivating search for happiness in a bright yellow cosmos full of thought-inspiring messages. The Happy Show was organized by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art and curated by former ICA director Claudia Gould, presently Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director at New York’s Jewish Museum. Following presentations in North America, Paris and at the MAK Vienna, the enthusiastically celebrated exhibition is being coordinated at the Museum Angewandte Kunst by Peter Zizka. 3 / 4 Pr e s s e i n f o r mat i on Frankfurt am Main, 29.03.2016 Stefan Sagmeister Stefan Sagmeister (b. in Bregenz, Austria in 1962) represents a new type of designer who draws on a global wealth of emotionally charged experience. He can be loud, colourful and sometimes eye-catching without becoming dogmatic; he likes to transcend boundaries but never loses sight of the need to communicate. He stands for a mode of graphic design that strives not merely towards the aestheticization or clarification of visual worlds but is concerned instead with the rediscovery of design as an important social factor. Sagmeister projects his messages onto reality and shows that graphic design and typography, often viewed purely as means of promoting sales, can also be used to understand an increasingly condensed and fast-moving world. Stefan Sagmeister’s design style blends typography and pictorial language in a striking – and sometimes even disturbing ‒ manner, and it has made him one of the most influential graphic designers of the past decades. Among his most well-known works are his album covers for Lou Reed, The Rolling Stones, Brian Eno & David Byrne and the Talking Heads as well as his innovative campaigns for companies such as HBO und Levi’s. Sagmeister has received numerous international design awards and two Grammys for album designs. Sagmeister studied at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna. In 1986, after completing his degree there, he received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for two years. In 1992 he went to work for th e well-known advertising designer Leo Burnett at the latter’s Hong Kong agency. In 1993 he changed to Tibor Kalman’s New York office; the same year he founded his own studio, Sagmeister Inc., in Manhattan. Since 2012 the designer Jessica Walsh has been his partner in their joint studio, Sagmeister & Walsh. 4 / 4 Pr e s s e i n f o r mat i on Frankfurt am Main, 29.03.2016 Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show 23 April – 25 September 2016 Director Matthias Wagner K Curator of The Happy Show at the Museum Angewandte Kunst Peter Zizka Location Museum Angewandte Kunst Schaumainkai 17 60594 Frankfurt am Main Information T +49 69 212 31286 F +49 69 212 30703 [email protected] www.museumangewandtekunst.de Opening hours Tue, Thu–Sun 10 am – 6 pm, Wed 10 am – 8 pm Admission 9 euros, reduced 4.50 euros Sponsor Clifford Chance Hotel partner Fleming’s Hotels Press contact Dorothee Maas, Julia Ditsch and Julia Quedzuweit T +49 69 212 32828/75339/73243 [email protected] Press downloads www.museumangewandtekunst.de Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit T + 49 69 212 32828 F + 49 69 212 30703 [email protected] .