Paula Scher, World Trade (2010). Acrylic on canvas, 92 x 157 inches. This work appears on the cover of the Summer 2018 issue of Signs. © 2010 by Paula Scher. Permission to reprint may be obtained only from the artist.
Artist Statement
For the past twenty years, renowned graphic designer and fine artist Paula Scher has been reinterpreting society’s approach to data and our visual representation of the trafficked environment. Through her large-scale cartographic paintings, she has created a novel way of mapping traditional information while subjectively twisting and confounding it. Intricate, colorful, and obsessively detailed, her paintings have the foundations of accuracy but are ultimately impressionistic visions of our interconnected world. Scher culls data from informational media such as headlines, commercial maps, and diagrams and renders them in madcap fields of hand-drawn typography. The accumulated textures and patterns provide an exuberant portrait of contemporary information in all its complexity and subjectivity, while questioning our innate ability to synthesize and analyze.
Artist Biography
Paula Scher is one of the most acclaimed graphic designers in the world. She has been a principal in the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991, where she has designed identity and branding systems, environmental graphics, packaging, and publications for a wide range of clients. She is an established artist exhibiting worldwide, and her designs are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Library of Congress, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions. She is the author of Make It Bigger (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), MAPS (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), and Works (London: Unit Editions, 2017). A documentary on her and her work can be seen in the 2017 Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design.