Graphic designer, Noma Bar has created a hands-on installation for the forthcoming London Design Festival. Cut It Out, at Outline Editions Gallery, 17 - 30 September will give visitors the opportunity to create their own little piece of Noma Bar art with the help of, what can only be described as a giant dog shaped hole-punch.
Bar first discovered his love of caricature and pictograms when he was a boy, growing up in Israel during the Gulf War. While staying with his family in a shelter, Bar sketched a likeness of Saddam Hussein around a radioactive symbol he found in a newspaper. Since graduating from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, and taking up residence in London, Bar has been commissioning pieces for a rather impressive set of clients, including Time Out magazine, BBC, The Observer, The Economist and Wallpaper*.
With a limited pallet, Bar subtlety and precisely manipulates shape and form where familiar symbols and pictograms evolve into new meanings. Negative and positive spaces tessellate, creating several images in one that sometimes need a few moments to see. Bar often chooses risqué subjects, such as nuclear warfare, corporate greed and national identity, and creates something with a hidden twist of humour. 'I am after the maximum communication with minimum elements', he says.
Cut It Out is an interactive sculpture, which allows viewers to create their own prints. Based on a manual embosser, this bespoke, large-scale punching machine/sculpture will cut out exclusive Noma Bar designs with the remaining negative space forming an image. The gallery visitors can take a piece of paper, choose from a variety of designs, and manually feed the paper into the machine, creating their own cut-out print that will be signed and numbered by Bar as part of a limited edition series. Alongside Cut It Out, the artist, fresh from a sell-out show in Paris, will be exhibiting a range of other new prints, displaying his imaginative mixture of 'double-take' imagery and biting social commentary.
