London’s Kemistry Gallery celebrates the rise and rise of David Pearson, the ultimate one man cover band, with a display of his work for Penguin and Zulma. The Guardian reckons he’s one of the fifty best designers in Britain, and his AGI membership hints that his currency extends far beyond this sceptred Isle, but one suspects that David Pearson is too closely focused on his work to worry much about the accolades it's accruing. Of course, obsessiveness is the mark of many successful creatives and it is plain from the balance evident in Pearson’s craft that he too suffers that affliction. This is nowhere better displayed than in the book covers he has created for the publishers Penguin and Zulma, from which much of the above acclaim has resulted – it’s little wonder that London’s Kemistry Gallery has chosen them as the subject of its forthcoming exhibition.
As the address of Pearson’s personal website, typeasimage.com indicates, the designer works within relatively strict parameters. More often than not he will avoid direct illustration of the allotted text, preferring to communicate the tone and rhythm of the literature that he is enrobing by using a series of complex yet artful typographic set pieces. For instance, one of his most celebrated recent works is a re-editioning of George Orwell’s 1984, for which Pearson simply embossed the book’s title on a familiar orange-banded Penguin jacket and then redacted it. It is exactly such examples of graphic intelligence that, through his work on the publisher’s Great Ideas and Penguin by Design series, has helped revive the company’s fortunes. Kemistry Gallery’s exhibition promises to be a riposte to those who predicted the redundancy of the printed object and the arts particular to it.
David Pearson
Kemistry Gallery, London
8 May — 28 June 2014
kemistrygallery.co.uk