Extra Academy is a spontaneous alliance of Extra City, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Sint-Lucas Antwerpen.

The guest speakers of 6 March are Thomas Mayfriend and Luc Derycke.

Thomas Mayfried

Thomas Mayfried is a graphic designer based in Munich and Paris. He designs printed matter, but also develops complete visual identities for clients in the cultural sector.

From 2003 to 2011 he directed the visual identity of Haus der Kunst (Munich). In 2010, concluding those fruitful years of collaboration, Haus der Kunst displayed an exhibition of Mayfried’s work, curated by Swantje Grundler and Chris Dercon. The show juxtaposed commissions in diverse visual disciplines (graphic design, photography and art) and art works from the collection, thus displaying an archive imaginaire of commissions for other artists’ work, laying bare personal influences, inspirations and design methods.

“Graphic design is often sold as a designer’s artistic contribution. For me, design is rather a dialogue which can only be conducted with a sparring partner. But sparring always competes for the appropriateness of a design, never for aspects like taste, marketing, advertising or mediation. Appropriateness seems to reek of old school, condemned by using formal or aesthetic criteria as contemporariness and is simply ignored or put to death. On the contrary, appropriateness is sexy. It does not have to be fashionable, it’s just contemporary.”

Luc Derycke

Luc Derycke was trained as an artist (KASK, Ghent) and has been active as a publisher, editor and book designer since 1988. He soon began to focus on the design and production of art books and from 1999 to 2007, was in-house designer of The Drawing Center (New York). He has also received several nominations and awards both in Belgium and abroad.

Derycke tries to bundle “all aspects of the development of a book, which not only consists of content and from, but also of institutional context, historicity, its relationship towards historical canons, the market, budget, technology and materiality.” Consequently, for Derycke the form of a book goes much further than graphic design per se.

In 2005, Derycke founded both Studio Luc Derycke (with Thomas Desmet) and MER. Paper Kunsthalle, a non-profit organization aiming to investigate books as ‘mental’ exhibition spaces.

Luc Derycke has collaborated with Walther König Verlag (Cologne), The Henry Moore Institute (Leeds), Gagosian Gallery (New York) and the Belgian publishers Lannoo and Mercatorfonds, among others.

Language English