Lyrois

The Lyrois Story

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Lyrois is an art scheme, an experimental brand, and a design meme in the making. Lyrois sounds similar to the french Le Roi, yet it is otherwise unrelated.

In 1997, Alexander Becker drew a bunch of shapes, 17 figures gathered around the silhouette of a dancer. Since then, they come back, year after year, in always different styles and designs, covering bags and wallpapers, populating store walls and windows, as well as being featured on tiny vinyl stickers and cut as huge decals or tableaux; elaborate arrangements on industrial materials. Repetition changes.

The shapes are sampled, over and over, with the techniques du jour, and the materials we contemporarily love; bright, opaque, or translucent vinyl, bulletproof bullet-resistant (it depends...) plexiglas, hi-tech paper, and industrial adhesive foil.

Inspired by theatrical Gobos, Lyrois plays with light and shadows and their projections.

The original vector-graphics, their lines combining fragile leaves and powerful graffiti strokes, are never altered themselves, their outlines always remain unchanged. Everything else evolves around these already iconic shapes.

It is the guilt of contemporary superficiality, the struggle with lightness, and the conflict of art and design, which fuels the notoriety of Lyrois.

Projects -- upcoming or completed -- include Lyrois-appearances in architecture, fashion, art, and design productions, as well as unique collaborations in store- and interior design.

Behind the Scenes is covering everything from the Lyrois universe: Ready-made art for sale and to be given away, customizations, commercial projects and collaborations, also previews of work in progress.

Some things are not for the public, which allows only partial views that often lead to interesting speculations about the unseen and many times result in new expressions of a visual language that is built along the way.

Announcements and fragmentary ideas are collected and documented here, exemplary designs and some making-of posts that reveal how it's done.

The peaking behind the scenes, reporting straight from the shop, is based on the idea of developing in public, we could just as well hide everything and wait 'til we're there but that wouldn't be nearly as exciting as creating here and as-is.

A list of selected works gives an overview.

Lyrois also accepts custom commissions, one-of-a-kind productions picking up collector's input and environments.

Labels: 1997, about, architecture, art, decals, decoration, fashion, graffiti, interior+design, lyrois, press, vinyl