Paper and Press: Three Centuries of Dutch Type
The show follows a single letterform from a steel punch the size of a fingernail to a poster you can read across the room. Most of the objects have never left the foundry archive.
Two Monotype casters run on the half hour. They are loud, they smell of hot metal, and they are the reason the room has a queue at eleven.
A side room reconstructs the correspondence between a punchcutter and a printer arguing for eleven months about the weight of a comma. The letters are shown beside the proofs they refer to, which is the only way any of it makes sense.
The middle gallery holds proofs that were never used — rejected weights, abandoned italics, a display face cut for a newspaper that folded before it shipped.
Guided tours in Dutch and English on Thursdays. The caster demonstrations stop an hour before closing so the metal can cool.
Upcoming events
Blue Hour: Cyanotypes from the Raval
Forty prints made with river water and morning sun, hung in a former dye works on Carrer de Joaquín Costa.
Form Follows Feeling: A Bauhaus Retrospective
One hundred objects that taught the century how to sit, read and pour. Curated with the Dessau archive.
Spiegelgasse Salon: Four Evenings of New Music
Four evenings in a first-floor room that seats sixty, with the composer in the third row each time.
Chromatic Studies: Albers to Now
Homage to the square, continued. Colour interaction from 1950 to the present in twelve rooms.
Refshaleøen Winter Market
Forty stalls in an unheated shipyard hall, open four hours a day for three weekends.
Nocturnes at the Glass Pavilion
Chopin and Glass after dark, performed for ninety listeners under a single suspended light.