Zvi Tolkovsky

Untitled Israeli Abstract Collagraph AP Print

M. Peter Piening was born on March 14, 1908 in Grabow, Germany. He began his education at a private school in Italy, studied at the Jesuit school of Kloster Ettal in Bavaria, and attended the German Stettin Gymnasium, where he graduated in 1926. Between 1926 and 1928 Piening studied design at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. There he was taught by multiple famous twentieth-century artists, including Joseph Albers, Paul Klee and Mies van der Rohe. After receiving his master’s degree from the Bauhaus in 1929, Piening enrolled at the University of Berlin and obtained his PhD in philosophy in 1931. Piening spent his early career free-lancing as an illustrator and artist for various publishing companies, eventually settling in Paris to work for Condé-Nast’s French publication of Vogue. In 1934 he moved to the United States to work in Condé-Nast’s New York City office. For the next two decades, Piening worked for many important advertising agencies and magazine publishers, including the N. W. Ayer and J. Walker Thompson agencies and Life and Fortune magazines. As art director for Life in the 1930s and for Fortune in the 1940s, Piening completely redesigned the layout of each magazine. He also redesigned the layouts for thirty-four other major American magazines, including Town & Country and Cosmopolitan. Through his design work, Piening had a great impact on the American public, although the millions who encountered his work most likely never knew his name. Between 1934 and 1964, Piening designed over sixty logos and trademarks for internationally-known products and companies. His most widely-recognized logo may have been the three interlocking rings of Ballantine beer. Piening’s other trademark designs include the Lincoln Zephyr...

Original etching, aquaforte, aquatint engraving. poetry text by Robert Pinget on facing fold of sheet. The individual sheet is unsigned. The justification page is hand signed by th...

Torsion / primer is a ten colour archival pigment print on 305gsm, 100% cotton, Hahnemühle fine art paper. The work can be supplied unframed, or framed and ready to hang. I tend to use fairly minimal glazed and painted tulipwood frames, and set the work ‘straight in’ under the fillets, without a window mount. If you’d like to discuss other framing choices to suit your space please do get in touch. Individually signed and numbered From an edition of 24 prints, plus 2 APs Image size ⋅ 88cm H x 72.2cm W Sheet size ⋅ 100cm H x 82.2cm W . Torsion / primer is a variant of an original base drawing that was used to create the ‘torqued’ forms of the more complex Torsion / REZ works on Plexiglass. The idea comes from a number of places but in particular the modernist sculptural work of Walter Leblanc, and his idea that if you heat up a thin bar of steel, and torque one end through a number of rotations, whilst clamping the other end firmly, the resulting form will be a hugely satisfying candy twist of metal, spiralling up or down, depending on your choice of rotational direction. For Torsion / primer I drew tall...

The Kitchen Drawer Simply an overwhelming source of detritus... 'Detritus' series was born from the twin frustrations of lockdown halting all planned projects, yet litter still somehow being dropped in abundance on my street. With no idea of the final output, or indeed the hygiene implications, I started to collect, scan, and record what I found. When I realised these colourful misshapen objects could be turned into something beautiful, the frustrations left me and I began looking for other sources of Detritus. These collages gave me purpose during the pandemic and allowed me to grow something beautiful from a place of frustration. My aim is to simply give viewers of the work a fleeting moment of calm. Unable to shoot anything, I’ve been making collections of things I find on the ground and scanning them to create composite images of otherwise ignored or discarded objects." - George McLeod...