Talking parameters, good pasta and dream jobs with HORT founder Eike König

The work of Eike König’s studio HORT is well-known to most in the graphic design world. But today we’re talking about his personal projects, which have thus far only been accessible on his Instagram feed, where his poster designs nestle alongside HORT Nike projects and a black cat called Loki snoozing on mid-century furniture. It’s a spectacular collection of contemporary eye-candy, but it’s tricky to untangle the images and give them meaning.

That’s why Jacob and Nathan of Studio Haw-lin have been commissioned to build Eike a website: “You can guide people when you have a site,” says Eike. “It gives you a chance to control how people look through your work.”

However, Eike says he’s not really a fan of websites, deeming it romantic to think too much about arranging the old instead of focusing on the present. Online is for experiencing images in a certain fragmentary way, but for Eike it is a more intense experience than when you see work in a gallery, where you can admire scale, material quality and a poster’s relationship to space. “When you see an image on the phone or computer, whether you’re looking at a screen print or a tapestry or a slice of watermelon, in the end you’re looking at the same thing – glass, a photograph and light.”

He’s just come back from Portland, where he had his first Eike König show at the Fisk gallery. The show brought together Eike’s strongest pieces from the last few years, a group of work he’s been defining and refining since he partook in the prestigious Villa Massimo residency in Rome in 2013. This one-year residency is usually only awarded to artists, composers and writers. “It was the first time I felt I could do something that wasn’t related to HORT,” the designer says. “It was the first time I could do something without a reason or a commission, without the purpose of selling it.”

Graphic designers thrive on restriction and the safety of having a brief, but when Eike went to Rome he had nothing: “I had no network there, I had no programmes installed on my computer, no equipment, it was very scary.” When he arrived, he spent the first week walking around, figuring out where to find the best art supplies and coffee. “I needed to not be an alien; I needed not just the physical space but the emotional space too. You get that from knowing things like where to get the good pasta.

“When I knew where I was, I started thinking about what I should do with my time. I just sat there, looking at nature, and I thought and thought for hours. Then I repeated those thoughts. Gradually they became more abstract.” Drinking espresso in a sun-baked, tree-lined courtyard, Eike realised that what interested him most was words, and the strangeness of looking at a word or sentence for so long that its meaning starts to slip and change. “I decided, okay, I will never have a real conversation with this idea if I don’t give it a body – a physical body. That means writing it down or painting it.”

Walking to the local second hand bookshop, Eike found a Helvetica typeface – the body for his idea – and he scaled it up, buying paper at the same time. “I decided that I would only use this paper and only one Helvetica point size.” The paper he chose was a classic: it’s what graphic designer turned celebrity artist Andy Warhol used, as well as German Fluxus frontman Joseph Beuys. With his paper and his typeface, Eike had found himself the crucial parameters, and now he could start experimenting on the blank, 72 × 102 cm page. Two years later, the paper size still remains the same.

What interests Eike most is what happens to words in the digital age, a time when a word’s meaning can shift and alter so quickly. One print emphatically reads “NO SIGNAL”, another “MY SPACE”, and another spells out the internet’s resounding “OMG.”

“When I think about words it’s really magic – turn one around, think about it for a while, put it in a gallery, put it on a poster, and its meaning can change. Words also mean completely different things to different people.” At his Fisk show, two people bought a series of six frames that spell out the sentence “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” and Eike was fascinated by what the buyers intended to do with such a pointed question. One of them has a big production company in the US, and he wants to hang it in his meeting room: “That’s intense, all his employees having to face that every day.” The second buyer was a woman with a family. She wants to hang it in her bedroom; she said it will give her the time to think about her self. “The context of the prints changes its meaning, and I love that both buyers got completely different things from the work.”

Eike cuts out letters from thin foam and presses them on the page to make these posters, saving the leftover foam for a series made purely from the scraps. The process is physical and takes time, and it reminds him of his days at art school before designing on the screen. There are drawers filled with these posters in the HORT studio.

“Some work is lame, but it needs to be!” he says. “I try something, I put it online, and then I prove whether it’s good later. I don’t prove it first. Even if something is dumb, I have no problem showing it.” The stuff that’s good will stick and flow out of the Instagram stream and onto the website, says Eike, it’ll be framed and hung on the gallery wall, and sometimes it’ll also be made into a screen print and suddenly there’ll be 100 copies available. The work will find itself in new contexts.

Eike was ambitious with HORT when he first set up the studio, and it’s no different with his artistic work today. He loves spending weekends meticulously cutting letter shapes from foam and arranging typographic compositions or whiling away evenings experimenting with neon light signs. He collects words from books and signposts on a list on his iPhone, he’s begun working with tapestry. But he’s hungry for more.

“I met Stefan Sagmeister the other day; he also did the residency in Rome. He takes a sabbatical every few years in Bali to focus on his own ideas. That’s what I’d like to do,” says Eike. “People always ask me in interviews what my dream job would be. I’ve already done so many dream jobs. But this is the dream. It’s not a job, but it’s the dream of doing things for myself.”