{"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\/products\/arefin-arefin-graphic-design-tony-arefin-ikon-2012","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}