Pictograms
Nieves, 2008
A series of 60 black and white drawings. The afterward of the Nieves edition suggests that they were executed between 1976 and 1996 and editions of 10 of each image were produced.
The Nieves edition, one of the few anthologies of Lavater’s work, was produced with Zurich’s Galerie Brigitte Weiss. One of Lavater’s most recent editions, it is, as of press time, readily available, and you should buy it, right now.
The photos accompanying this post are from the Nieves site.
From the afterward, which is hand-written by the artist in German, but translated into English and French:
once upon a time…
…In non-transparent ink I used to put the lines on a transparency and had ten prints made on 140 gramm paper by Rudolf Keller in Zurich. This minimal number of copies and the A2-format, the largest possible ordinary format for plane print, kept costs low. Since for me it has always been a matter of pictograms, this black-and-white technique was highly adequate.
I numbered the “pictograms” consequetively from 1 to 60, regardless of whether the sequence or the sheet itself were “ready for the stage” or not.
Nor was I concerned with writing things down, but rather with drawing things up… in any case with keeing in-view…