Emotion Overload.

Galerie im Marstall Ahrensburg/ Art Gallery Ahrensburg 
September 2023, all photos taken by me

Some factors played big parts in visiting this exhibition. First, and once again, I was delighted. Delighted with how things sometimes come together, or pieces seem to fall into place for me. Very emotional pieces, to be honest.

By zapping from channel to channel one afternoon I came across an interview with graphic designer Aubrey Powell. For the first time I heard about the Englisch art design group Hipgnosis. I was fascinated. Design takes up a huge space in my heart, design is love. And I knew all the big names of the bands and musicians the album covers were created for. That was another great plus! The knowledge I have about design and music, the deep emotional attachment I have with some of the songs and artists, also comes through love to a special person.

Soon after the documentary I read an incredible post about Peter Gabriel’s 1980 album ‘Peter Gabriel 3’ and learned that the cover ‘Melt’ was also a creation of Hipgnosis. What a wonderful encouragement again! The post about the album and its songs was what I needed to send me to an adventure. I researched the documentary one more time and found the dates of the exhibition.

Surprisingly, the exhibition was in a lovely small town in Germany, in Ahrensburg. I was curious about how such a famous art movement had made its way into the art gallery of an idyllic place in the North. I asked at arrival and was told it was a collaboration between the Stiftung der Sparkasse Holstein and the Browse Gallery Berlin.

I entered the exhibition, and on the spot, I was entirely taken by the way the artwork was arranged. It was stylish and very modern. Exclusive. Exquisite. From the first second in I knew that this would be a very emotional, touching, a full of love journey for me.
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Let’s have a look!

Wish You Were Here- Red Scarf- Pink Floyd 1975

Photodesign: Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson/Hipgnosis

"The red scarf blowing in the wind suggests that nothing lasts- an empty gesture."

​Stay with the description for a moment.

Is it an empty gesture, altogether? Or is there something else too? I love this image. Can you see the naked woman who is hiding in or disappearing inside the veil?

Maybe she is in love but hiding her feelings because she is afraid of getting burnt when taking that leap to love.

​The veil is red. In many cultures the colour red is a symbol for love, strength, commitment, responsibility, and courage. Is there a goddess inside that beautiful windblown scarf? It is a very powerful, sensual, and expressive depiction of a story that should be told, a story  different for everyone yet full of treasure and enchantment.
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​A Collection of Great Dance Songs- Pink Floyd- 1981

Photodesign: Aubrey Powell, Peter Christopherson and Storm Thorgerson/Hipgnosis/T.C.P.

“By the early 1980’s Hipgnosis had decided to call it a day creating album covers. We were bored with it, and the introduction of the tiny compact disc clinched the deal. With the platform of music video taking over we formed a film company instead.”  - Aubrey Powell- 

"This image was designed by the Hipgnosis team under the pseudonym T.C.P (Thorgerson, Christopherson and Powell) in order to detract from clients endlessly asking them to create still more cover designs instead of films. The picture features two dancers attempting the Tango whist tied to the ground. Dancers who can’t dance. A reference to the title as Pink Floyd rarely if ever wrote dance songs. The band enjoyed the irony."

Pink Floyd- The Later Years – 2019

Photography: Rupert Truman

“I was inspired by a visit to MoMa in NYC and a PopArt sculpture of a bent traffic light. The girl in the road symbolises the power of Pink Floyd, twisting out of shape everything she passes- shades of Uri Geller’s spoon bending tricks. The landscape is the Mojave Desert, California, a suitable setting for a sci fi incident. This is a modern-day digital montage of fifteen different elements created by Michael Johnson and photographed by Rupert Truman on a digital Hasselblad.”
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So, how this this iconic design happen?
Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd - 1973
®Hipgnosis

Well, it happened like this.....
„In the autumn of 1972 Storm and myself went to Abbey Road Studios in London to present ideas for the album cover The Dark Side of the Moon. The band unanimously choose the now iconic pyramid with a prism design. The rough sketch, drawn with crayons and pencil, had to be turned into an architectural illustration that could be deciphered by a printer. Neither Storm nor I had the skills to create such an accurate plan, and so we turned to our friend and graphics man George Hardle to realise the artwork. In retrospect the artwork looked extremely drab, made up of a series of grey tracing paper overlays with airbrushed triangles and line drawn boundaries depicting the refracted colours of a rainbow on one side and a white, penetrating line on the other. The mechanical, as artworks were called then, would only take shape once it was printed in tens of thousands, and so the presentation was a trust of faith. How could we, Pink Floyd and Hipgnosis, know it would turn out to be so popular a design, still decades later. The album sold 45 million copies."
​- Aubrey Powell -
​®Hipgnosis

Always in between the covers there were great pieces of photographic work along the way- here for example snapshots of Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Aubrey Powell, Storm Thorgerson in the years 1974/1975.

Al Steward- The Year of the Cat - 1976
Hipgnosis/C. Elgie/ Illustration: C. Elgie

Oh, and now- what a overwhelming surprise! ​This made my heart perform flip-flops! I was so moved by seeing this because the song, and therefore the cover, have a very personal meaning to me. I remember us listening to this and me listing to the music for days in a row after I weas introduced to it. Oh my god, how beautiful!

When Storm and I heard the track “The Year of the Cat” at Al’s house in North London we both thought obsession. Ailurophile is a person obsessed with cats. This is Cat Woman, nemesis to Bat Man in another life. Impossible to create photographically as a collage we turned to Colin Elgie, a Hipgnosis illustrator, to render our idea. 
- Aubrey Powell -

Look Hear? - 10cc- 1980
Photography: Aubrey Powell/Hipgnosis

The album cover itself was 90% text, not unlike a newspaper headline. A large, fragmented graphic asking ‘ARE YOU NORMAL’. The image of the sheep on a psychiatrist’s couch was very small by comparison, but what could be less normal than a sheep on Sunset Beach in Hawaii?

“Storm presented the idea to 10cc and suggested that the beaches of England in winter would look dismal. I wanted Hawaii – for the sun, the waves, and the sand. The band agreed and it paid off. When I arrived in Hawaii there were no sheep or psychiatrist’s day beds, so both had to be sort out over the following week. It was complicated and far from normal.”
​- Aubrey Powell - 

​Amazing photography of several covers Powell and Thorgerson created for Pink Floyd during those very fruitable years, it was such a brillliant collection of works. I enjoyed looking at them very, very much.  I could talk for days about this. 

All artwork shown above ®Hipgnosis (Created by A. Powell, S. Thorgerson)

Herman Rarebell - A Nip in The Bud - 1981
​Photography: Aubrey Powell

I was totally fascinated by this one. How beautiful is this, right? Can you see all the details that matter so much? What do they mean? 

"Hipgnosis had worked many times with the German band The Scorpions. The drummer, Herman Rarebell had made a solo album and asked Hipgnosis to create a cover. He had very definite ideas that it should be fashionable and stylish, and the narrative should allude to some sexual tension- the possibility of a ‘menage a trois’. Photographed on a Hasselblad."
                                                   - Aubrey Powell - 

Savage Eye - The Pretty Things - 1975
Photography: Aubrey Powell, Storm Thorgerson

Here is another outstanding piece of photographic art if you ask me. I'm intrigued with this image. Stunning. 

"Eye catching, simple and effective. It’s a particularly beautiful eye. Storm and I had been drawn to images of eyes since watching surrealist films such as Louis Bunuel’s ‘Un Chien Andalou’. Photographed on a Hasselblad in black and white and then hand tinted.”
​- Aubrey Powell - 

Peter Gabriel 3 - Peter Gabriel - 1980
Photography: Aubrey Powell, Peter Christopherson and Storm Thorgerson/Hipgnosis

And finally! Finally, I found what I had come for. There it was. The Peter Gabriel album I have a deep personal connection with. Again, seeing it here was so moving for me because it has a very profound association with love. I felt the embrace of it, and I felt the loss. I was touched, full of love and happy, and also quite sad- all three at the same time. Very, very intense for me. 

Known as Melt, this portrait of Gabriel was inspired by the work of American Photographer Les Krims, and how he manipulated Polaroid pictures. Like Krims, Hipgnosis chose not to be constained by the formalities of traditional photography. so were free to experiment with the mechanics and chemicals of the medium. They took dozens of Polaroids of Gabriel. 

"The whole studio became involved. It was a competition to see who could make Peter's face the most interesting. We worked like an art school, Gabriel included, in the squashing, squeezing and smearing the developing images. It was one of the most enjoyable afternoons and the decision as to which one to pick became a battle of wills." - Aubrey Powell
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Going to see the the exhibition was one of the best decisions I could make. I enjoyed every bit, every moment of it. I have never seen anything like it before. I learned a lot about the circumstances how it came to the covers. I had the chance to catch a glimpse into the life of the bands and the interaction between music and the art of photography. I'm very grateful for any tiny emotion I sensed, for being challenged with myself and my feelings.