Greeting card: Love (Gold)
Greeting card: Love (Gold)
Fratelli Bonvini
In 1966 the American artist Robert Indiana drew the word LOVE in four square block letters - L and O stacked above V and E, the O tilted - and made it into a sculpture, a print, a US postage stamp, and one of the most recognisable images of twentieth-century American art.
This card is a tribute to it. The typographic studio Cabaret Typographie has taken the same word, the same stacked construction, the same flat colour blocks, and made the work again in their own register - a small homage in card form, with envelope.
Cabaret Typographie is a collective of three - Laura Dal Maso, Mauro De Toffol and Tommaso Pucci - working in graphic art and type since 2010. They work out of the Bonvini1909 atelier in Milan, inside the historic stationery and printing shop, on experiment, graphics, and the typefaces of other eras.
Blank inside, for your own words.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Greeting card with envelope
11 x 16.5cm
About Fratelli Bonvini
There is a stationery shop on Via Tagliamento in Milan where the colours on the walls, the cabinets, and the wooden drawers are the ones installed in 1909. Fratelli Bonvini has been a working shop that entire time, and it looks it - not restored to look old, but old, continuously, without a break.
Costante Bonvini opened it that year. He had noticed that people in the district were travelling kilometres for paper and ink, so he opened a stationery shop and brought his sister Luigia in to run it with him. Before long it was a printworks as well: Bonvini designed and printed for an industrial quarter that was expanding fast - letterhead, posters, wine labels, the work a whole neighbourhood needed done. Three presses carried it, among them a platen press from the nineteenth century.
By 2011 the shop had passed out of the family, and it was close to closing for good. In 2014 a group of printers and typographers took it on - not to modernise it, but to keep it exactly as it was. Every fixture stayed. The presses still run.
What Bonvini makes now is letterpress: artworks, cards, notebooks, and pencils, printed in that same room, on those same machines, by people who took the place on precisely because it had not changed.
Fratelli Bonvini is exclusive to Australia at The Leopard.
