Manuel Birnbacher | Float

A designer who works between Berlin and Munich. A designer whose projects show both a versatility and a synthesis of an enormous mix of sources. A designer whose work is unsettling, introspective and chaotic. That is Manuel Birnbacher, the creator of the graphic design artwork Float.

The Floating Islands

Through Float we enter into the landscape of Manuel Birnbacher's mind. It is a wasteland of impossibility. Solids float, their surfaces changing like clouds in a breeze. These are the colourless folds of the creative's brain. Each image is a carved edifice, etched not by hand but by the manifold experiences on Manuel Birnbacher's mind. The structures, shown to the viewer, suggest they are sections of a greater whole. They are the parts understandable to our simplistic Euclidean geometry. Each of Manuel Birnbacher's landscape twists, inwards and outwards. It propagates, it slithers, it rolls and contorts on top of itself. Each of its movements is aimless, a use of energy for its own sake. In one instant an image of Float is simultaneously breaking and constructing. A mind tearing itself apart and the infant mind building its first connections. It is a picture of something both alive and dead. It is a creation of Manuel Birnbacher. It is Float.

The Face Of A Child

Perhaps the most interesting image is that of a bust of a child carved out of stone. In the context of Float, the image can represent a beginning or end point to the work. It is the child whose mind we enter and view in the other images. The resultant endpoint of the storm of movements that exists for an instant or forever. Or a representation of how one feels after viewing Float, a mere child lost in the wilderness.