KONTAKT MAGAZINE

We celebrate, inspire and support the creative community.

imagen of lucy Mckenzie

McKenzie collaborates with other creatives regularly. Through her collaborations, she challenges the notion of authorship by pointing to the strength of collective actions.

Zahoor ul Akhlaq painting

ZAHOOR UL AKHLAQ

Zahoor ul Akhlaq was a pioneering artist from Pakistan. He is known for his approach to painting, sculpture, design and architecture, as well as his teaching at the NCA (National College of Arts) in Lahore.

art installation emily speed

EMILY SPEED

Experience a new film installation by North West based artist Emily Speed. The film is inspired by Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, a satire of Victorian society, where all existence is limited to two dimensions.

storied magazine cover

STORIED

As an independent magazine/journal and online platform, STORIED celebrates the notion of slow and sustainable journalism, touching personal narratives, and considered recommendations for the conscientious explorer.

interior house table

BERLIN QUARTERLY

BERLIN QUARTERLY is a European review of long form journalism, literature and the Arts. It's a new cultural journal with global perspective. It combines in-depth reportage, literature and visual culture.

victory journal magazine cover

VICTORY JOURNAL

Victory Journal is a print and digital publication devoted to the intersection of sport and culture. Rather than engage in statistical analysis or partisan squabbling, Victory spotlights the drama of sport and the enduring glory of athletic pursuits the world over.

Nomad is located in Munich, north of the Alps at the heart of Europe—a city that offers a high quality of life, home to a lively start-up community and leading-edge future technologies.

ARCHITECTURE

Drawn by Light

HARTUNG BERGMAN FOUNDATION

The light drew Hans Hartung and Eva Bergman to France’s Côte d’Azur. To understand it, go to their former home in Antibes, a white modernist complex built for the two married painters in the 1960s. You will see what they saw. The air is crisp in the morning, tinged light blue like the sky. The colours are brilliant by midday, blinding. Then the palette thickens, enriched by yellow tones as the hours go on. And if you stand on the platform of stone that hosts the blue square of the swimming pool, that looks out past the olive grove and the studio buildings, beyond the terracotta roofs and cypress trees, you will see the light in all its colours refracting on the sea.

“When lights and colours come together, when they blur, naturally we are drawn to it,” says Thomas Schlesser, director of the Hartung Bergman Foundation, a space newly opened to the public that is based in their former home. “The blur suggests a distance that you want to close; it forces you to pause, and interpret.” Though he might just as easily be speaking of the view, Schlesser is talking of Hartung and Bergman’s work.

hartung house

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the coffin for Armitage’s call. Images formed and reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl’s towers and ragged Fuller domes.

kinkfolk journal magazine cover

Bergman endured the struggles of a woman artist in her time. “She did not receive much recognition,” Schlesser says of Hartung’s wife. Their home leaves traces of their story. The swimming pool suggests Hartung’s love of fitness; it also suggests a remedy to his lack of exercise after losing one of his legs fighting with the French foreign legion.

Hartung and Bergman’s separate studios suggest different methods: while Hartung worked often under a neon glow through the night, Bergman preferred daylight. And the fact of the house’s existence is an ode to the pair’s final coming together. She would photograph the landscape of the region and reduce it to its basic forms in painterly compositions, a technique her husband shared.

kinkfolk journal magazine cover

The two painters were married young but divorced in 1939, due to health complications and the War. They drew up plans for the home jointly, finally tasking an architect to execute them after they reunited and remarried in 1957. In her paintings, a rock becomes a circle, a crevice a parabola, a cliff face a square.

But understanding how the couple lived requires some guesswork. There are gaps in our knowledge. We can imagine them peering out at the sea; diving into the pool; working restlessly from their studios. The foundation encourages this. But still the outline is slight, a ghost of their lives. It is for us to interpret. This makes it richer. It is as if we are looking at a landscape, but see only a faint blur.

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