ABOUT

Gfeller & Hellsgård / Bongout is a graphic design studio which runs its own silkscreen workshop.
We do graphic design work for everyone from underground record labels to skateboard brands,
from illegal noise concerts to mainstream music festivals, movie productions, corporate clothing - and tobacco companies.


CONTACT

Gfeller & Hellsgård GbR
Torstrasse 110
10119 Berlin
+49 (0)30 280 93 758
studio@bongout.org


AESTHETICS

Our influences range from contemporary art to outsider art, underground comics culture, Swiss typography, Cuban, Polish and Russian posters. We try to be as open as we can all the time to new influences that cut across all disciplines of art and culture. The visual aesthetics and attitude of independent cinema, noise music, rock´n´roll clichés and black metal inspire us as much printed material. One of our earliest influences were the record sleeves designed by Nick Garrard, manager of British psychobilly band The Meteors. He had a garage punk label and was putting out a lot of rockabilly reissues in the late 80s and early 90s. The covers were all really well done. They were inspired by vintage design and used a lot of old fonts found in 50s magazines but he used them in a contemporary context. It was similar to the work Art Chantry was doing in Seattle but nobody else was doing stuff like that. The Killed By Death sleeves, a series of compilation LPs featuring rare and raw vintage punk songs, were also a big influence. This was all before computers, when everything was still done by hand. It wasn’t really illustrative, more like graphic design but also inspired by punk aesthetic. It was work that played by the conventions of graphic design but also set out to destroy them. That was very inspiring to us. Most of the fonts and typesetting in our works are done by hand. We hand draw fonts or use Letraset. You can see when something has been typeset by computer, it’s all too straight and clean. Even if you don’t notice it, you feel it. We want to keep a hand-made quality in our work. We use the computer as a tool without letting it dictate to us and becoming a slave to it.


MUSEUMS & COLLECTIONS
Our designed Silkscreen Books & Posters are in following institutions:

• MOMA New York
• MOMA San Fransisco
• Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCS) in Strasbourg
• Harvard University Fine Art's library in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Art Institute of Chicago
• Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania
• University of the Arts in Philadelphia
• Smith College in Massachusetts
• University of California in Los Angeles
• University of California in Santa Barbara
• University of California in Santa Cruz
• Sächsische Landesbibliothek- Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek, Dresden, Germany
• The State Museum of Berlin, Art Library, Germany
• Fine Arts Galleries, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina
• Occidental College, Los Angeles
• Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
• Trinity College, Hartford, CT
• University of California at San Diego
• University of Connecticut at Storrs
• Yale University, Art of the Book Collection, Sterling Library, New Haven, CT