The Collage Artist Who Told Meissen He Would Only Design a Gin Bottle If It Could Be Real Art

Stefan Gunnesch had already designed the stopper for a small Saxon gin brand’s bottle when its founders asked him for more. He said no, unless the next project could be real art rather than another piece of branding. What followed was a collaboration with Meissen, one of the world’s oldest porcelain manufactories, and a set of limited-edition gin vases built on the same vanitas tradition that runs through the rest of his work.

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Introduction

Stefan Gunnesch works in fragments. The Leipzig-based artist builds his collage practice by cutting up photography, much of it his own, and layering the pieces with paint until a single, unstable image emerges from the wreckage of several. It is not a technique that obviously suits a drinks brand’s marketing calendar, which is precisely why his route into a collaboration with Meissen, the porcelain manufactory founded in 1710, is worth telling properly.

The connection began small. Juniper Jack, a craft gin distilled in Saxony, had commissioned Gunnesch early on to design the head, the decorative stopper, for its bottle. It was a straightforward branding job, the kind of one-off design commission that rarely leads anywhere else. When the distillery came back and asked him to do more, Gunnesch turned them down, on one condition. He would take on a bigger project only if it could exist as real art rather than another iteration of the bottle’s branding. The distillery agreed, and the result was not a redesign. It was a collaboration with Meissen itself, producing a run of limited-edition porcelain gin vases that carry Gunnesch’s visual language rather than the brand’s.

A vanitas painter working in torn photographs

Gunnesch’s core body of work is a series called Daemonien, its title borrowed from a 1920 essay on the self by the physician and writer Carl Ludwig Schleich. The series sits inside a much older tradition than collage itself: vanitas, the genre of still-life painting built around the transience of life, the futility of pleasure and the certainty of death, more usually associated with seventeenth-century Dutch painters than with a contemporary artist working in cut photographic paper.

His method is destructive before it is constructive. Gunnesch fragments and damages source photography, frequently images he has taken himself, then rebuilds the wreckage into new, layered compositions with paint. The resulting works read as faces or figures only partially reassembled, which is exactly the point: a body of work about impermanence made by physically breaking an image apart before putting something new together from the pieces.

That practice has carried Gunnesch well beyond Leipzig. He is represented by Nadia Arnold Ltd in London and Galerie DRUCK & BUCH in Vienna, and his solo exhibition Underneath the Skin, Hidden Identities opened at Nadia Arnold Ltd in London in the autumn of 2019 before travelling to Miami’s PULSE Art Fair. His work sits in a run of collections that few working collage artists reach: the Ampersand Foundation in Johannesburg, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo’s Toppan Printing Museum, Stanford University Libraries, Collectie Koopman in The Hague and the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts, also in Johannesburg. He has since taken on commissioned work for Christian Dior and Aesop, brands that, like Meissen, came to him after seeing what the Daemonien series does with a fragmented image.

What the first commission actually was

Before there was a vase to design, there was a stopper. The head of a gin bottle is a small, awkward brief for any artist: it has to be gripped, it has to seal, and it has to read as a single object from across a bar rather than as a composition meant to be studied up close, the conditions Gunnesch’s collage work is usually made under. Translating a practice built on layered, torn photographic fragments into a solid, three-dimensional object that a drinker picks up and turns in their hand is a different problem to the flat, wall-mounted works that make up the Daemonien series, and it is worth naming as its own piece of design work rather than folding it into the vase collaboration that followed, because the two commissions solved different problems.

That first job is also why Juniper Jack came back to Gunnesch specifically rather than briefing a product design studio for whatever came next. A distillery that already trusted an artist with the one physical object every customer touches before they open the bottle had reason to think he could be trusted with something larger, once he agreed to do it on his own terms.

A gin brand that shares the same stubbornness

Juniper Jack was built by Jörg Fiedler, a trained business lawyer who had previously worked in wine sales for the Saxon estate Schloss Proschwitz, and master distiller Siegbert Hennig. The pair spent eighteen months developing their recipe in the Lommatzscher Pflege, a range of hills near Meissen, before filling their first batch from a copper still in Reichenbach. Fiedler has described the standard he set for the finished spirit in blunt terms: he wanted a gin identifiable as gin blind, and even with a heavy cold. The brand sources its juniper from Croatia, holds to London Dry Gin’s rules on additives, and distributes deliberately narrowly rather than chasing volume.

The name is a small piece of eighteenth-century theatre. Juniper is simply the English word for the German Wacholder, the plant a London Dry Gin is built around. Jack comes from Jack Juniper, a satirical stage pseudonym used by a brewery worker who lost his job after the 1736 Gin Act, English Parliament’s attempt to tax and restrict gin production, a subject theatrical enough at the time that it produced its own mock elegy for the drink. It is a brand that clearly likes a story with some historical weight behind it, which makes the eventual choice of Meissen, rather than a more conventional packaging studio, look less like a leap and more like a brand finding a collaborator who works the same way it does.

The condition that turned a branding job into an art commission

Designing a bottle stopper is commercial work, and Gunnesch had already done it once for Juniper Jack without incident. The distillery’s request for something more is where the collaboration could easily have stayed exactly that: commercial work, scaled up. Gunnesch’s refusal to take the second project on those terms is the detail that makes this collaboration different from most brand and artist tie-ins, where an artist’s existing style is simply licensed onto a product’s surface. He set the condition first, that the next piece had to function as art in its own right, and only once that was agreed did Meissen’s porcelain enter the project as the material that could carry it.

Meissen has made porcelain in Saxony since 1710, three years after the manufactory’s founder, the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger, first produced hard-paste porcelain in Europe under commission from Augustus the Strong, who wanted a domestic answer to the porcelain then arriving from China at enormous cost. Every piece to leave the manufactory since has carried the crossed-swords mark adopted not long afterwards, one of the oldest trademarks still in continuous use anywhere. Meissen has worked with contemporary artists on its porcelain before, including the American ceramicist Reinaldo Sanguino, whose porcelain stools for The Future Perfect set 1990s New York graffiti against the manufactory’s eighteenth-century surfaces, so Gunnesch’s vanitas-built imagery is not the first contemporary language the manufactory has agreed to carry. The porcelain itself is still mixed, thrown, painted and fired largely by hand, to individual order rather than mass production, which is close enough to Juniper Jack’s own small-batch, copper-still approach to gin that the collaboration reads as two Saxon crafts recognising the same instinct in each other, as much as it does an artist working with a famous name.

Putting Gunnesch’s fragmented, vanitas-rooted imagery onto that material, rather than onto glass or printed card, is what turns the collaboration into the kind of object a collector holds onto rather than a limited-run bottle that gets recycled once it is empty. Porcelain also survives the thing vanitas painting is usually about: a fired piece of hard-paste porcelain is, materially, about as close to permanent as an everyday object gets, which sets up a direct tension with imagery built around transience and decay.

Three editions, three hundred and thirty-three pieces each

The collaboration produced a run of limited-edition gin vases across three separate releases, each capped at 333 pieces and paired with its own gin variant: a Five-Year Anniversary Edition, an Easter Edition and a Christmas Edition, filled respectively with lemongrass, mandarin and quince gins rather than Juniper Jack’s standard recipe. Three hundred and thirty-three is a specific number to choose deliberately for an edition size, and it fits a project built from the start around scarcity and craft rather than volume, the same instinct that shapes how narrowly the brand distributes its regular gin.

Each vase carries Gunnesch’s visual language translated onto porcelain rather than photographic paper, the fragmented, reassembled quality of the Daemonien series rendered in a material built to survive centuries rather than a print run. That longevity is very much the point of a vanitas object: a piece explicitly about transience, made in a material and by a manufactory built to outlast everyone connected to it.

Where the Meissen commission led

A collaboration with a three-hundred-year-old manufactory is not a small credit to carry into a next conversation, and the work Gunnesch has taken on since suggests it was read that way. He has completed commissioned work for Christian Dior and for Aesop, two brands with their own established, closely controlled visual identities, the kind of client that tends to look for an artist whose practice can survive contact with an existing brand world rather than being absorbed by it. The Meissen vases are the clearest public demonstration of exactly that: Gunnesch’s fragmented, vanitas-built imagery sitting on a manufactory’s own three-hundred-year-old porcelain without either one cancelling the other out.

It is worth returning, at the end, to the condition that started it. Gunnesch did not ask for more money or a longer contract when Juniper Jack came back with a bigger brief. He asked for the freedom to make something that functioned as art regardless of whose name was on the label, and a small Saxon gin brand, rather than a larger house with more to lose, was the one that said yes.

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Final thoughts

It would have been easy for a small gin brand’s second commission to an artist it already had on side to stay exactly that, a bigger, better-funded version of the same branding job. Gunnesch’s refusal to take it on those terms, and the distillery’s willingness to agree to his condition instead of finding someone more accommodating, is why the result is a set of porcelain vases sitting in Meissen’s own three-hundred-year tradition rather than another gin bottle with an artist’s name attached to it. The vanitas tradition Gunnesch works in is built on the idea that nothing lasts. It is a pointed material to have chosen, then, that the collaboration ended up made in the one substance in the project built specifically to.