Squeegee!! – the European gig poster movement

The Red Can Company, Kirchenstr. 26, 81675 München, www.red-can.com

This is a must have for everybody who likes screen printed gig posters. After forewords by Bernd Hofmann and Joris Diks some artists/studios are presented with many photos that show the daily routine in the printing process. Next you get introduced to the four most important exhibitions for poster art in Europe: Flatstock, Colored Gigs, Le Gig Poster? and Posters Rock! The main part of the book is filled with 36 artists from all over Europe showing their poster art and everybody is asked the same seven question, some with a short introduction. In the course of the book this can get a bit boring here and there, since the answers are often more or less even. But you can look at the posters, every artist has three pages and you get to see approximately five posters.

Of course there is good and bad designs, depending on who you ask. The main problem here is – again – the format. 17 x 23 cm are just too small for a art book like this. The works do not really come into their own. While posters shown a piece a page work well, the others are only double the size of a stamp, do require a magnifying glass. Each poster is described (band, colors, size, year, price). Insane to see that some of the poster are rated over 200 Euros… but most of them are 20 – 60 Euros – which is still not cheap, considering in the end it is only a colored piece of paper that became a gig poster. And if you put aside the magnifying glass held over the whole “gig poster movement” one needs to realize that a gig poster is just one little piece of the whole. There is some punk bands on the posters, a lot of Indie-Bands, some bigger acts and everything in between, a wide variety. The book was funded by the crowd, so there must be a lot of screen-print-gig-poster-lovers out there. If you are one of them, get this full color 180 pages basket of poster art. 22,00 Euro (dolf)

Isbn 9783000539350

[Trust # 183 April 2017]