Why Stefan Gunnesch is in the Design 100

Stefan Gunnesch works from Leipzig, where his studio Bildschriftlich handles his own collage practice alongside a parallel career in book design and typography. The two disciplines share a method: cutting, layering and reconstructing printed material until a new image holds together. His collages draw on the Vanitas tradition, the still-life genre built around skulls, wilting flowers and hourglasses, in which mortality is treated as a subject a picture can depict rather than merely reference. Gunnesch carries that inheritance into contemporary collage, where the act of cutting becomes part of the argument the finished work makes.

The same discipline shapes his commissioned work. When Meissen approached him to design a limited-edition gin bottle, Gunnesch declined a conventional branding brief and negotiated a version he could treat as a standalone artwork. His solo exhibition, Underneath the Skin: Hidden Identities, shown in London and at PULSE Art Fair Miami, carried the same visual language to a wider audience: a memento mori assembled from someone else’s photographs.