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For its new 3,000 square metre store at Coal Drops Yard in London‘s King’s Cross, Cass Art commissioned Pentagram to design a graphic frieze that runs for more than 30 metres around the interior, creating a continuous backdrop to the art materials on display.
The design takes fourteen of the world’s best-known paintings and reveals the pigments and materials that they are made from. Rather than reproducing the artworks themselves, each is represented by its title and artist, contained within an illustration of the frame in which the original painting sits. Alongside it, the chemical formula and molecular structure of a dominant or significant pigment used in the painting reveals the science behind the colour.
Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire is paired with yellow ochre and hydrated iron oxide; Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring with ultramarine; and Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper appears alongside lead white. Elsewhere, Prussian blue, burnt umber, alizarin and other pigments become part of the frieze’s colourful graphic language.
Combining bold typography with the visual language of technical drawing, including molecular diagrams, chemical structures and fine-line illustrations of brushes, paint tubes, palettes, rulers and other artists’ tools, the frieze connects these in a continuous story that moves around the store.
The approach builds on the typographic language previously developed by Pentagram for Cass Art, but gives it a new dimension for King’s Cross. Although it contains a large amount of information, the monochrome treatment allows the frieze to sit quietly above the displays rather than competing with the colour and density of the products that are housed below.
Seen from a distance, the frieze works as an architectural graphic running through the space. Closer inspection reveals another layer, with familiar artworks that reveal the physical substances used to make them.
Designed by Pentagram and manufactured by Bags of Ethics, a new tote in the ‘Bags of Art and Design’ series featuring Cadmium Yellow and Pyrrole Orange has also been released to celebrate the new store opening.
The project continues Pentagram’s longstanding relationship with Cass Art, spanning its identity, stores, packaging and own-brand products. At King’s Cross, the frieze makes a direct connection between the materials artists use and some of the world’s most familiar works of art.
