The very first exhibition of a Berlin artist and graphic designer, Andreas Töpfer (born 1971), in the Czech Republic has the characteristic of an interim retrospective. Based on the author´s rich archive, it supports the wide range of using the drawing as a medium. There are mostly memos of everyday life, noted on A4-sized office papers or A5-sized in notebooks and illustrations, often vector or vectorised, with different extent of relation to the text. For Andreas Töpfer, drawing is an integral part of one’s identity, memory and a documentation of individual history. Inspecting the author´s archive is like looking into his mind with the option of re-playing his thoughts. To him, drawing primarily represents a method and a metaphorical backbone of thinking process. This “solid ground under your feet” or “backbone of thinking” is also a creative source of all his projects aimed at the utilitarian field: creation of books, magazines or running his own publishing house. All of this, in cooperation with contemporary artists, writers and philosophers. At the same time, the author´s position remains autonomous. Hence, thanks to Andreas Töpfer, the utilitarian field expands the discursive realm of contemporary art. The author himself claims that when he creates, he does not illustrate a text, but develops an independent visual language with its own universe. Each of his drawings communicates a messages almost at textual level. Speculative poetics, which covers also Anreas Töpfer´s works, is a linguistic laboratory researching literature and poems. Töpfer published a book called Speculative Drawing 2011-2014 (2014) together with philosopher Armen Avanessian. Amongst other Töpfer´s prominent projects belongs the creation of a magazine and travelling exhibition The Origin Of Senses (2015), realized in cooperation with Sabine Scho. He and Daniela Seel founded a publishing house, called kookbooks in 2013, where he illustrated and made graphics for more than 80 books. Andreas´s works presented at this exhibition form a cross section of this part of author´s ouvre, and it also features his visual dairies containing thousands of drawings.
