Christian Bretter (*1972)
A native of Eastern Styria, Christian Bretter (born 1972) is a sculptor who regards his activity as a magazine designer as an integral part of an oeuvre which, taking the phenomenon of the body as its starting point, oscillates between such fields as furniture, sculpture and media. Bretter, who has been commuting between Brussels and Vienna since 2009, pursues a strongly conceptual approach not only as a fine artist but also as a designer in that he plays with, rather than follows, design conventions. In the course of several years as the designer of the German edition of the American women’s magazine “Glamour” he developed a visual language for the mass-circulation Condé Nast publication which was inspired by comics and albums of poetry. He even went further, parodying his own role through the use of stylisation and exaggeration. For “Durst” (Thirst), the student magazine from the publishers Falter, Bretter is currently pursuing an oppositional strategy by using the principle of improvisation to undermine the obsession with perfection which is customary in magazine design: Every semester he designs, together with a team of students, an extremely lively magazine in which the authors often also act as mobile phone photographers, an approach which happily lends the finished object a strong sense of both humour and reality.