The Edouard Malingue Gallery was founded to show emerging and established contemporary artists from around the world. The gallery was established in 2010 and opened with the largest solo exhibition of Pablo Picasso ever held by a gallery in Hong Kong. In addition to presenting dynamic solo exhibitions, the gallery pushes the boundaries of art in public spaces and stimulates artistic discourse through collaborations with curators worldwide and the production of individual publications and catalogues.
To coincide with an expansion, which led the gallery to move from their previous space (designed by Rem Koolhaas and OMA) to the new premises; a 6000 sq ft space in the Central district of Hong Kong, Edouard Malingue Gallery approached Lundgren+Lindqvist for a comprehensive redesign of the gallery’s visual identity.
The new identity revolves around the number three, which is most visibly represented in the reoccurring stroke divided in three sections; titled ‘the Trisection’. The Trisection is an abstraction of the gallery name’s three words. It is also a representation of the three strokes needed to make a readable E (as in Edouard) or M (for Malingue). As it happens, there are also three letters that occur three times in the gallery name, and the new gallery is located on 33 Deux Veux Street.
The Trisection is used extensively throughout the identity, not only to arrange sections of text and images, but also to dictate the overall grid used for a range of applications, or the number of folds for leaflets, letters and posters.
A bespoke typeface, Malingue Grotesk, was designed in collaboration with the Italian design studio Think Work Observe. Malingue Grotesk is modern one-weight sans-serif with some curious characteristics and special glyphs, which is used across all of the gallery’s printed and digital communication.
The gallery's stationery was printed on delicate uncoated Takeo stock. For the bespoke envelope, which employs special manufacturing techniques to achieve the required precision, we used a semi-transparent off-white plastic paper (also from Takeo), which provides an interesting contrast to the letterhead. The business cards and correspondence cards are letterpressed with one side in English (white) and one side in Chinese (black) and set to be turned vertically rather than horizontally. Across all applications, the measurements of the present pieces are given, relating back to the precision with which the works are labeled and handled.
We continue to work closely with Edouard Malingue Gallery on expanding the new visual identity and the gallery's digital presence.
See the website that we designed and developed for the gallery in a separate case study here.
