Harry Stendhal Presents Fluxus / George Maciunas "No Smoking" Screen Print Portfolio of 4 Images

Stendhal Gallery in collaboration with George Maciunas Foundation Inc. is pleased to announce the pre-pubrication of Fluxus / George Maciunas "No Smoking" screen print portfolio of 4 images measuring in size 40" x 40" (101.6 cm x 101.6 cm) each hand pulled screen-printed on Lana Quarelle paper from France.

New York, US, January 11, 2012 -- George Maciunas’s extreme dislike of smoking was at once very personal—his seriously poor health made him sensitive to smoke and a political one—in the face of all the collective Fluxus work to be done, smoking seemed to him frivolous, self-indulgent and decadent. It was this combination of the personal and political that compelled Maciunas to develop fellow Fluxus artist George Brecht’s idea for a “no smoking” sign (c. 1963) into an innovative visual graphic, which both traded on and countered corporate advertising of the day.Maciunas was a highly skilled typographer and graphic designer. He did commercial work to seek out a living, but used non-commercial venues to experiment with new ways of representing ideas in graphic form. His multi-disciplinary studies in architecture, art and graphic design at Cooper Union, in architecture and musicology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and in art history at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, exposed him to an array of visual information—from musical scores to architectural blueprints—giving him the tools to develop his unique graphic style. We see this early on in his ambitious information charts, begun in the late 1950s, which trace developments in the histories of art and world events, covering antiquity to the present. As a society we are now much more aware of the grave health risks of cigarettes to smokers themselves but also to those inhaling second-hand smoke. Despite the disappearance of the Marlboro Man in most countries, tobacco ads continue to be ubiquitous, using clever brand management to attract new (and increasingly younger) customers. A 1996 ruling by the FDA revealed how tobacco companies were using cartoon characters as brand logos and pushing sales policies that targeted minors and sought to prevent such strategies obtain the design in small sign, poster or wallpaper format. Contrary to glossy, seamless corporate advertising aimed at manipulating desires to turn a profit, Maciunas’s unconventional aesthetic actually calls attention to the way image and text are constructed to convey a thought-provoking social message.

Artist: Fluxus / George Maciunas
Title: No Smoking
Medium: Hand Pulled Screenprint
Paper: Hand-made Lana Quarelle Paper from France
Size: 40” x 40” (101.6 cm x 101.6 cm)
Year: 1971/2012
Publication Date: March, 2012
Pre Publication Price: $2500.00
Edition Size: 250
Published by Stendhal Gallery collaboration with George Maciunas Foundation Inc. Each portfolio is accompanied by certificate of authenticity signed numbered and dated by chairman of George Maciunas Foundation Inc. For a limited time, the portfolio will be available for special pre-publication price of $2,500 in March, 2012. After the publication, price will increase to $4,000.

For more information, please contact to George Maciunas Foundation Inc.
George Maciunas Foundatin Inc.
454 West 19th Street. New York. NY 11011
(212)-675-4392 | info@georgemaciunas.com

Stendhal Gallery in collaboration with George Maciunas Foundation Inc. is pleased to announce the pre-pubrication of Fluxus / George Maciunas "No Smoking" screen print portfolio of 4 images

Contact :
Harry Stendhal
George Maciunas Foundation Inc.
454 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
212-675-4392
info@georgemaciunas.com
http://georgemaciunasfoundation.org

This release was published on openPR.