An exhibition surveying the life and career of Jewish émigré sculptor, Fred Kormis, who repeatedly saw his practice interrupted and work damaged or destroyed throughout his career. These diverse works range from the woodcut prints he produced whilst being held for four years in a Prisoner of War camp in Siberia during the first World War, to the medallions he made of leading figures in British life after the second World War, as well as documentation of the first memorial in Britain to the victims of Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust, and photography of works that were lost.

Kormis worked as an artist during the politically and culturally tumultuous Weimar period, and during the Nazi era revealed himself to be Jewish, a decision that led to the removal of his art from galleries. Kormis and his wife Rachel Sender left Germany in 1933, and many of the works he left behind in Germany were lost. In exile in relative poverty in Britain from 1934, Kormis formed deep links with many in the Jewish refugee community in London.

His artistic practice was varied and evolved over time, but his experiences as a prisoner of war created in him a lifelong preoccupation with memorialising and representing in sculptural form the emotional impact of captivity.

The graphic identity plays with the idea of Kormis’ evolving practice, combining a mid-century-inspired transitional serif with a mixture of weights and sizes of the typeface Monotype Grotesque.

Like many early explorations of sans serif lettering, Monotype Grotesque is formed of a sprawling family of rough-cut ‘styles’ designed at different times and combined together, never having been originally conceived as a coherent family. This interplay of rough cut forms balanced with the elegant nature of the serif body text creates a striking juxtaposition.

The exhibition utilises magnetic boards and adjustable shelving to lay out compositions of numbered ephemera that tie-in with the exhibition captioning running below. Each is printed on a warm-white, uncoated, paper.

Large-scale information panels with condensed all-caps titling draw attention to the start of thematic sections. Smaller contextual images are either printed onto these panels or sit as group compositions, printed on a heavy-weight board for impact.