An artist's book built around KOOL ("cabbage" in Dutch), a new font designed by Magali Reus, winner of the seventh edition of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Prize for Sculpture.
Midway between a plant alphabet and concrete poetry, the KOOL font is created in collaboration with Antonio de la Hera and Kia Tasbihgou and includes twenty-six lowercase letters, twenty-six uppercase letters, a complete set of numbers, sixteen punctuation marks, and six symbols.
The project is the upshot of a three-year research project focused on the visual and calligraphic relationship between scraps of red cabbage and letters of the Roman alphabet. The volume is inspired by the traditional format of the type specimen book, or type foundry sample book, used to show clients the myriad graphic possibilities, layouts, and configurations unique to a new typeface.
The book features texts by design writer Emily King and Rebecca May Johnson, a food specialist, and was created in conjunction with Off Script: a solo exhibition by Reus staged by the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation in collaboration with the Museo del Novecento in Milan.
Born in 1981 in The Hague, London-based artist Magali Reus is one of the most acclaimed new voices in contemporary sculpture. Renowned for her interest in the relationship between mass-produced articles and the human body in the context of today's digital society, Magali Reus draws on a vast range of formal influences and references, from the domestic to the industrial, the functional to decorative, creating pieces that evolve as an accumulation and layering of sculptural details. Taking everyday objects as starting points, her work operates on a visual register as a formal configuration, but also as a choreography of emotional and physical experience. For her, objects like fridges, padlocks, seating, and street curbs are not seen only as facilitators of our everyday actions, but also as physical receptacles for our bodies. She is thus interested in positioning them not only as shells or providers, but as objects imbued with their own sense of personality. Detached from their surroundings and translated into immaculate, abstract forms they become uncanny and perplexing, acquiring a very different life, which is almost theatrical. Colliding the macro logic of daily architecture with the more metaphorical projections of a body inhabiting space, Magali Reus' practice focuses on the physical and psychic space of objecthood.
