{"title":"Tony Arefin","description":"\u003cp\u003eTony Arefin (1964–2000), born Abed Mohammed Arefin in Karachi and raised in London from 1974, was a British graphic designer whose practice through the late 1980s and 1990s constituted one of the most consequential and least credited contributions to the visual culture of contemporary British art. Working under the name Arefin \u0026amp; Arefin, he produced catalogues, invitation cards, announcements and institutional publications for the ICA, Chisenhale Gallery, Serpentine Gallery and Ikon Gallery, as well as printed matter for Damien Hirst’s \u003cem\u003eFreeze\u003c\/em\u003e (1988) and \u003cem\u003eModern Medicine\u003c\/em\u003e (1990). He left London for New York in 1993, working at \u003cem\u003eI.D.\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eBomb\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eBlind Spot\u003c\/em\u003e before moving into advertising. The first comprehensive survey of his work, \u003cem\u003eArefin \u0026amp; Arefin: The Graphic Design of Tony Arefin\u003c\/em\u003e, was published by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 2012, designed by James Langdon.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"douglas-gordon-it-doesnt-matter-who-i-am-tramway-glasgow-1993","title":"DOUGLAS GORDON — It Doesn’t Matter Who I Am. I Just Want to Talk to You: The Sociable Art of Douglas Gordon, Generisch \/ Tramway, Glasgow, 1993","description":"\u003cp\u003eGenerisch \/ Tramway, Glasgow, 1993. Softcover exhibition catalogue, 54 pages, 15 × 20 cm. Colour wrappers; black-and-white and colour reproductions throughout. Designed by Tony Arefin. With original 4-page 24 Hour Psycho: Hitchcock’s Tomb exhibition handout, text by Stuart Morgan.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe useful thing about this copy is that 24 Hour Psycho is still inside it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublished in 1993, The Sociable Art of Douglas Gordon catches Gordon before the institutional biography had overtaken the work. The catalogue moves through text pieces, telephone interventions, sound and projects built around unstable identity and communication — including the unsolicited call to Liam Gillick from which the title is taken. Ross Sinclair contributed the catalogue text; Tony Arefin gave the publication its extraordinary turquoise cover and oversized typography.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInserted alongside it is the original Tramway handout for 24 Hour Psycho, shown 24 April–23 May 1993, with Stuart Morgan’s essay Hitchcock’s Tomb. Gordon’s slowing of Hitchcock’s Psycho to a twenty-four-hour duration became the work that announced him internationally; three years later he won the 1996 Turner Prize.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe pairing is unusually exact. One publication describes a practice built around repetition, anonymity, memory and borrowed material. The other records the work in which those strategies suddenly became unavoidable.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCatalogue and handout remain separate objects. Their placement together does the rest.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: good. Visible handling, light edge and corner wear, creasing to lower front wrapper and minor surface marks. Handout with light age toning and handling consistent with use.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Generisch \/ Tramway","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54285861847378,"sku":null,"price":225.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Gordon_Douglas.ItDoesn_TMatterWhoIAm.IJustWantToTalkToYouTheSociableArtOfDouglasGordon.1993.jpg?v=1786961686"},{"product_id":"arefin-arefin-graphic-design-tony-arefin-ikon-2012","title":"AREFIN \u0026 AREFIN: THE GRAPHIC DESIGN OF TONY AREFIN, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2012","description":"\u003cp\u003eSoftcover, 24 × 33 cm, 123 pp, offset printed throughout in colour. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2012. Published for the first comprehensive survey of Tony Arefin's work. Catalogue designed by James Langdon, with an essay by Emily King and a transcribed conversation between Langdon, Rick Poynor and Jonathan Watkins. ISBN 978-1-904864-79-0.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTony Arefin worked at the point where graphic design, institutional identity and contemporary art became difficult to separate. By the early 1990s, through catalogues for the ICA, Chisenhale, Serpentine and Ikon, and printed matter for Damien Hirst's \u003cem\u003eFreeze\u003c\/em\u003e (1988) and \u003cem\u003eModern Medicine\u003c\/em\u003e (1990), design critic Rick Poynor could describe him — accurately, and often, since the line gets repeated in every account of his career — as “single-handedly processing the print needs of the entire British art scene.” Arefin himself understood exactly what that meant. “As a designer you’re never credited but always complicit,” he told Anne Burdick in \u003cem\u003eEye\u003c\/em\u003e magazine in 1996, “in adding value to works of art, in forming market value and history.” He said this while still alive, four years before this catalogue would prove him right about his own posthumous reputation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHis own story is stranger than “British designer” suggests. Born Abed Mohammed Arefin in Karachi, his family moved first to Bangladesh and then, in 1974, to London, following political upheaval in Dhaka. His mother nicknamed him Tony. He worked briefly as a curator at The Photographers’ Gallery — organising a show of Neville Brody’s \u003cem\u003eFace\u003c\/em\u003e magazine design — before turning to catalogues of his own, styling himself “Arefin \u0026amp; Arefin,” half joke corporate identity in the manner of Saatchi \u0026amp; Saatchi, half genuine split: Tony and Abed Mohammed, English and Asian, London and later New York. He left for New York in 1993, worked at \u003cem\u003eI.D.\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eBomb\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eBlind Spot\u003c\/em\u003e, then moved into advertising at Wieden \u0026amp; Kennedy and Ogilvy \u0026amp; Mather. He died in 2000.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe designer is normally left outside the artwork’s history — responsible for the invitation, catalogue or announcement through which an exhibition travels, but rarely treated as part of the work’s construction. Arefin’s own account of his job refuses that position outright. Emily King’s essay captures the method behind it: he “would rather look at art in colour transparencies on a light box than see the real thing in galleries” — a designer converting three-dimensional objects into flat, saturated, sellable images, for artists who needed exactly that.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere’s a second layer of proximity behind this particular survey. James Langdon discovered Arefin’s work in 2000 — the year Arefin died — while working at Ikon Gallery as his first job out of art school. Ikon’s director, Jonathan Watkins, had made a series of catalogues directly with Arefin years earlier at Chisenhale Gallery, before he ran Ikon. So the institution staging this 2012 rediscovery is the same institution whose own director once worked alongside the designer, and the show’s curator built his career in the wake of an influence he didn’t yet have a name for.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLangdon’s catalogue design makes Arefin’s own infrastructure visible in turn: his catalogues, cards and institutional publications are photographed as physical objects against saturated yellow grounds rather than reproduced as flat, disembodied graphics. Their edges stay visible. Their scale stays legible. Printed matter becomes specimen — Arefin’s own trick, performed on Arefin.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe cover makes the whole proposition explicit. The turquoise object reproduced there is Arefin’s 1993 publication for Douglas Gordon, \u003cem\u003eIt Doesn’t Matter Who I Am. I Just Want to Talk to You. \/ The Sociable Art of Douglas Gordon\u003c\/em\u003e, produced for Gordon’s exhibition at Tramway, Glasgow, and reproducing a text-work Gordon had first shown the year before. An original copy of that same publication has previously passed through The New Rare.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe sequence is unusually exact: Arefin designs the object in 1993, for a text-work Gordon made in 1992. The object circulates with Gordon’s exhibition at Tramway. In 2012 it reappears as an image documenting Arefin’s own history — chosen, not incidentally, by a curator whose career runs back to Arefin’s own circle. The original publication later enters The New Rare independently, on its own terms. The support becomes document. The document becomes image. The image becomes another publication. The original keeps circulating regardless.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat recursive structure is what makes this more than a graphic-design monograph. It’s a book about the secondary material of art becoming primary evidence — the catalogue, card and institutional graphic no longer sitting outside an artist’s history, but actively producing it, exactly as the designer said it would, four years before his own death made him the subject of the same process.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: Very good. Light surface rubbing, handling and minor wear consistent with age.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ikon Gallery","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54548855456082,"sku":"TNR-2026-0645","price":45.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Arefin_Tony.ThegraphicdesignofTonyArefin.2012.jpg?v=1788591321"}],"url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/collections\/tony-arefin.oembed","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}