Frieze Masters
Frieze Masters
Magazine
Frieze Masters was founded in 2012 by Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover as a sister fair to Frieze London. While the latter focuses on contemporary art and living artists, showing work created mainly post-2000, Frieze Masters presents work made before the year 2000.
The identity for Frieze Masters magazine emerged from a passing thought — what would a “master” of 20th-century typefaces be? One answer might be Helvetica; but then, which version of Helvetica? We settled for Max Miedinger’s original design for the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei, which had just been redrawn digitally by Christian Schwartz from Commercial Type.
The cover is a nod to the specificity of Frieze Masters, which brings a contemporary point of view to the work it displays. Likewise, the die cut enables to play with unusual and dynamic crops. The magazine is a large format to showcase large images, but we were equally conscious about the need to keep the magazine light and easy to handle and therefore selected uncoated paper. The large, punchy graphic system we developed acted like a frame that can just as well display an ancient statue of a deity or a Willem de Kooning painting.
2012
