Gestalten

Übersee remains the perfect place to discover visual pearls amid modern design’s flotsam. And, as always, it’s free of both advertising and trends.

With sunshine in their hearts, our Übersee specialists have sought out a number of seasonal entries, absurdities in anything from pastel to technicolour, which both depict and subvert the lazy, crazy days of summer.

Photography receives generous coverage without pandering to snapshot aesthetics. Jeff Wall-inspired, hyper-realistic beach landscapes meet artificial postcard motifs with a jaunty light-heartedness. But this picture-perfect idyll is also broken up by darker works and topics such as the seaside viewed from a shark’s perspective, military-looking beach scenes and obscure collages.

Martin Parr, famous for his razor sharp views of the (usually British) collective soul beyond fetching beach blonde clichés, focuses on the topic in an interview. And, together with a large number of graphic design submissions, his concise words complete the overall “summer” theme.

As different from each other as the works collected in this issue of Übersee might seem at first glance, all of them are suffused by the unique lighting and mood that only the hottest time of the year can bring.