Items (sérigraphies), 2006
ambition was to develop an idea, and find someone I could propose it to.” This was a very courageous attitude, and Paul Kirps decided to put it to the test away from home. So he packed his bags and set off on a long preparatory journey. One of the places his travels took him to was the ECAL art college in Lausanne, where he was to complete a course in visual communication. Paul Kirps: “You have to remember what it was like at the time. Graphic artists weren’t the rock stars of today, it wasn’t an ‘in’ discipline. But from that moment on, I began to meet fascinating people. If I look back over the past, I can see that I owe a lot to these little episodes, to chance encounters, such my meeting Ruedi Baur (a well-known designer, responsible, for example, for the visual and descriptive identity of the Pompidou Centre, Ed.) in Paris.” The creator of the Integral Concept cross-disciplinary network was one of the first to sense and exploit the potential of Paul Kirps, initially commissioning him to design the agency’s catalogue. Paul Kirps: “For me, this was the apprenticeship I needed to complete my studies. I needed to see other people, to work out for myself what the graphic arts are.” Lausanne, Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam and Barcelona – his way was strewn with these preparatory encounters, until he came back to Luxembourg in 2004. Paul Kirps: “To some extent life made the decision for me – it was probably the right time to come back. I left 15 years before, and I didn’t know anyone in Luxem bourg any more. But I soon heard of MarieClaude Beaud, the director of the Mudam.” He set out to meet her with protekt, “an entirely self-financed project”, under his arm. They clicked immediately. “She understood what I was doing straight away; I really felt we were talking the same language,” he says. MarieClaude Beaud quickly got him into harness by commissioning him to realize a book dedicated to the Japanese photographer Izima Kaoru. The investment soon paid off, when the book won a publishing prize in Barcelona. But it was protekt that gave him his first inter-
national success. Paul Kirps: “This visual set – a range of fictitious items protecting against any situation that might disrupt everyday life – was my first real attempt at developing an artistic product hinging on a graphics language.” The Mudam bought 50, but, more importantly, offered it to MoMA which, with a world-wide call for projects, launched the exhibition Safe-design takes on risk. The correlation is clear, so much so that MoMA decided not only to exhibit protekt, but to a
“ I needed to see other people, to work out for myself what the graphic arts are.”
acquire it for its permanent collection. Paul Kirps: “This came as a total surprise! Nothing could be more prestigious, especially as this was the first exhibition to be held at the MoMA after its reopening!” At the same time, MarieClaude Beaud commissioned Paul to produce a definitive work for the window of the BDL in Kirchberg, temporarily serving as the Base Camp for the Mudam, which was still under construction. Paul Kirps: “It was a great honour for me to do this work, all the more so, as this exhibition (Graphique Deluxe, Ed.) included big names in design such as Laurent Fétis, and I was being treated as their equal” he recalls. With a strong visual identity, and guaranteed recognition, Paul Kirps could have slept soundly on his laurels with his future assured, but that would have been quite unlike him, with his gift for the unexpected: “I wanted to explore new routes, to take a new look at my work, and one morning, I had the idea of animating weird, fictitious machines, that I made by video montage from photos of various appliances – photocopies, phones, faxes, etc. I’ve always been like a child in front of a simple 47
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