Rob Tufnell is gallerist and curator who exhibits at a variety of venues – at the time, his gallery was based at 83 Page Street. The visual identity we designed for Tufnell’s gallery is adaptable for any space he takes on: business cards and letterheads are pre-printed with ‘Rob Tufnell at’, and his current address is stamped on by hand. We designed a tote bag to mark the occasion of Tufnell’s exhibition Panem et Circenses in summer 2012. The bag depicts the Olympic rings crushed against an anvil – an image adapted from a poster design from the May ’68 riots in France. The bag was accompanied by a small pamphlet presenting The Right to be Lazy, an essay by French revolutionary and Marxist journalist Paul Lafargue.
We also created an invitation for Tufnell’s exhibition Hyperborean Manners, which brought together artworks, books and ephemera with disparate political subtexts. The invite is a reproduction of a poster by Art & Language from 1975, which critiqued the arts’ 'superficial social tinkering with the inherent evils of capitalism.'
83 Page Street is a Grade II Listed pavilion designed by Edwin Lutyens as part of the Grosvenor Estate in SW1, London.
The exhibition title is an expression coined in the first century AD; translating as ‘bread and circuses’, it was a satirical commentary on the way in which governments appease their people in times of struggle, with superficial displays of generosity.
