PARIS.- La Gaîté lyrique invites you to embark on the exploration of sensorial and intellectual happiness, with Stefan Sagmeister as your guide. The Austrian-born New Yorker is a renowned graphic artist, the first pop star of the genre! He is also referred to as an interior designer, typographer, and artist. He is one those people whom a single word, label, or profession is not enough to define. An activist in the cause of graphic design that is rooted in real experiences and emotions, the author of legendary album covers – from the Rolling Stones to Lou Reed via Talking Heads - always transcends the commissioned work he does for clients to infuse subjectivity and humanity into it. His personal obsessions fill his sketchbooks and the endless lists he loves, inspire his research and, for the first time, an exhibition on a theme that is close to his heart: happiness.
After touring in North America, the exhibition The Happy Show arrived in the heart of winter in the European country that regularly has the lowest rates when it comes to well-being: ours. In La Gaîté lyrique, Sagmeister has found his new playground. As early as the very launch of this institution devoted to digital culture, his name has been mentioned. «The work and the generosity of Stefan Sagmeister lead to an exploration of the state of the world,» says Jerome Delormas, director of the Gaîté lyrique. «For those of us who see digital culture as a horizon, a state of thinking that generates uses, human relations and social facts, he is a real benchmark.»
For over ten years, the graphic designer has been compiling an inventory of happiness with a series of maxims and precepts he tries to apply to his life and that he incorporates into his personal projects, such as his work in advertising. Isn’t writing about happiness already a step in the right direction? Being happy is a work he commissioned himself to do for himself. And that he has every intention of sharing and publishing. «This exhibition will not make you happier,» he warns at the beginning of The Happy Show, before adding: «I tell you this so that your expectations are lower because to expect less is a good strategy.» As the Woody Allen of graphic design, humor and neuroses included, Stefan Sagmeister takes us
on the pursuit of happiness, a quest made of controlled personal experiences and dissected scientific generalities. His uniqueness touches upon the universal.
In the creative and physical quest of this Holy Grail, he opens up the pages of his captain’s log from the past several years, a personal journal that takes the form of typographic designs, formulas, videos, photos, both «handmade» and technologically sophisticated.
The Happy Show is a stroll filled with interaction, thrilling and enlightening observations in a meandering universe of yellow and black. Here, a message written in stacks of sugar that blush when you smile at them, over there, giant, multicolored neon sentences that light up if you break a sweat on a bicycle, but also cards on which you are given strange missions to accomplish along the way, films where the artist shares his experiments with meditation, a spider web with visionary announcements, murals with statistics on age, gender, love, money, and genetics where you invariably look to see where you fit in, and everywhere, from the restrooms to the emergency exits, little comments left by the artist, who functions as your guide.
The Happy Show brings together all the spaces of la Gaîté lyrique, which are dancing, listening, enjoying, learning, and playing to the sounds of a smart, playful and curious type of happiness. A happiness to share, to question, to experience, not only through this major exhibition, but also through workshops, concerts, lectures, and screenings which, following in the graphic designer’s footsteps, will question this human and insatiable quest.
Stefan Sagmeister still hasn’t found the recipe for happiness, but in the meantime, he’s inviting you to La Gaîté.
