Works and Work Samples

From the Studio: Listening to Nathanial Young

Graphic Design Notes on Lightness/ Notizen über das Leichte (Exhibition), 841 x 1189 mm, CMYK

Untitled (ongoing) Selection, Series
Since 2024, digital photography materialised in inkjet prints
Once you know death is present, living becomes liberating.

Untitled, 2024; 46.5 x 74.0 cm, Silkscreen print on wooden panels

Self-portrait, Series of iPhone images (Rapid Notes – Neuordnungen, 2024), Long car ride from Toronto to Montréal, Inkjet print, 148 x 105 mm

Rapid Notes – Neuordnungen

44 mobile phone photographs (iPhone XS) with typographic intervention, wooden display 300cm x 125cm x 8cm, Pine and MDF, Fine Art, Inkjet Prints, 2-fold mounted on 300g/m2 cardboard each, 105 x 148 mm DIN A6, 2024

In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, I took mobile phone pictures and wrote poems that photographically condense fleeting observations of my urban environment.

I created a serial work consisting of photographs and typographic interventions from various non-hierarchical, combining my impressions of the last few months as ‘postcards’. Based on the subjects of the images and their aesthetics, I have worked with fleeting postcard motifs that are intended to communicate in a rapid, unagitated and subtle way what was on my mind at the time – a simultaneity of impressions; continuously as a loop.

Hamburg Frappant Galerie, 2025 Arpil, 11 – 20, Group show

SMS Leipzig, 2025 April, 25 – 27, Group show

It’s a garden

It’s a book, it’s a seed to grow, it’s a world to show
Exhibition design for three different book awards parallel to the annual Independent Publishing Fair It's a book, ...
Lower level of the HGB Gallery, 23.03.2024, 6 composed surfaces à 240 x 240 cm to 3 islands, 5 x 70 x 100cm glued wood frame, spruce

Conception & realization: Lam Funke, Janine Sauter, Leonard Siegwardt with Inga Kerber and Stephan Schürer (Gärtnerei Belgershain)

It's a book – student's projects 2024
Best book design from all over the world 2024
Walter Tiemann Prize 2024

For this year’s It’s a book, ... an exhibition of award-winning books will be held for the first time. It’s a garden includes the selected publications from the It’s a book, ... Student Projects, the awards from the Best Book Design from all over the World competition and the prize-winning books from the Walter Tiemann Prize.

Following on from the annual theme, we want to capture the moment of growth in the conception, production and distribution of books and knowledge and transform the HGB Gallery into an abstract botanical garden for the day of the fair. Aspects of selection, consolidation and representation will undergo a similarly ambivalent process through the awarding of prizes as the conception of a botanical garden.

The prize-winning books become exhibits in a garden that is formed on the one hand from plants from the offices and workshops of the HGB Leipzig and on the other from Inga Kerber’s artistic position. In this garden, questions about the conditions and infrastructures of awarding prizes are critically synthesized. The space invites visitors to linger and explore both material and immaterial spaces of growth and flourishing.

Gardening activity is of five kinds, namely, sowing, planting, fixing, placing, maintaining. In so far as gardening is an Art, all these may be taken under the one head, composing.

Finlay, Ian Hamilton, “More Detached Sentences Exile, Gardening and Pebbles”, PN Review 42 11, no. 2 (1985), 18–20

Going for Failure in Order to Bloom

Photographic Series, 30 x 40 cm, Inkjet prints, Black/ White, Artist frame, Pine, 2025
In 2024 I had a second puberty: Thinking, Questioning, Doubting, Resting, Laughing, Describing

It’s a library

It’s a book, it’s fragmentary, together it’s a library
Artistic project regarding the annual Independent Publishing Fair It's a book, ...
Lower level of the HGB Gallery, 29.03.2025, Coated wooden planks, diverse colours, 19 x 43 x 5000 mm, 19 x 43 x 2500 mm

Conception & realization: Lam Funke, Leonard Siegwardt

For this year’s It’s a book, … we are looking at libraries and exploring the question of what modalities libraries need in order to realise their diverse potential. Libraries are not just ‘book containers’, but above all spaces – social spaces. At the HGB Gallery, we are working with the question of what concrete, architectural result the library needs in order to do justice to the social and cultural momentum.

Much is ‘under construction’ - there are not only spatial potentials that can be addressed, but also questions of representation, power and economy that need to be analysed with regard to libraries.

The HGB Gallery invites visitors to engage with the manifold levels of the library and to reflect on its future. The aim is to create a place of contemplation where visitors are expressly invited to linger.

Farewell And Arrival

Design concept for various media together with Leonard Siegwardt on the occasion of the HGB Diploma Rundgang 12.7. - 14.7.2024 with Meike Giebeler (Head of Press and Public Relations HGB), Ilse Lafer (Curator, Head of the HGB Gallery) and Janine Sauter (Graphic Designer)

i.e.Poster, DIN A0, 841 x 1018 mm, Poster, 700 x 1000 mm, Exhibition reader, 130 x 195 mm, Signage system, various sizes

Leonard Siegwardt and I worked on the content dimension of the term “graduation” for the appearance of the HGB Diploma Rundgang 2024. Based on a possible dichotomy of the German words “(Ab)Schluss” (Graduation) and “Beginn” (Beginning), we wanted to open up a position in our graphic work that understands graduation, or the farewell itself, as a beginning or an arrival. The graduation – is it “the end”? With this in mind, we discussed possible pictorial and typographical references to the initial question.

The image of twilight, sunrise or sunset?, is such a transit zone between “the one” and “the other” – between the days, between day and night.

Typographically, we worked with the register, index and imprint, whereby the latter can also precede or follow the content as such in the book, in the publication. In that list we added words referring to the dichotomy of end and beginning.