21.0 x 29.7 cm

DIN A4 is the most widely used paper size in the world. Its suc­cess story began around a hun­dred years ago. A4 was designed as a format for busi­ness let­ters and is still asso­ci­ated with this func­tion today. Invoices and adver­tis­ing flut­ter into our homes on A4 paper; con­tracts are signed and forms are filled in on it. It is the stan­dard for pho­to­copiers, and even in the sup­pos­edly paper­less office of the dig­i­tal age, the printer spits out emails and pre­sen­ta­tion notes on A4. And anyone in an office look­ing for a sheet of paper for hand­writ­ten notes will grab an A4 from the printer tray or the waste paper bin next to it.

The exhi­bi­tion brings together works on DIN A4 by con­tem­po­rary Swiss artists from dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions, who trans­fer the format from the sphere of the office to that of art. In doing so, they draw con­nec­tions to stan­dard­i­s­a­tion, to let­ters and forms, or to the sketchy and unpre­ten­tious, but also to artis­tic tra­di­tions of ‘works on paper’.

The artis­tic works are com­ple­mented by his­tor­i­cal mate­r­ial on the his­tory of paper size stan­dard­i­s­a­tion from the Library of Design in Basel.