Ersatzteillager explores the shapely visual language of artist Florina Leinß

Each artist has their own visual language. A mother tongue developed through influences, self growth and experimentation. As an audience member viewing any artist’s work we only see the finished product, where this language has been spoken, filtered and finessed. But, in Edition Taube’s latest book Ersatzteillager, a viewer gets to see the building blocks of artist Florina Leinß’s language which make her artworks, creating a publication that not only provides a dictionary of Florina’s work, but a sneak peek into her mind too.

A piece of Florina’s work begins with a shape, particularly drawing “inspiration from mechanical spare parts of every day objects,” Edition Taube explains. By drawing out the shapely form of these parts, the artist changes your view of what they were, are and could be, using a vibrant colour palette and playing with negative space. In turn, the original inspiration becomes, “disconnected from the context and function they once were designed for,” says the publishers, instead becoming “a starting point for visual exploration”.

Every shape featured in Ersatzteillager has been scaled and reprinted from a 10 × 15cm gouache painting, utilising the machines of printers DZA to develop a specialised colour profile to be reproduced in a 5/5 coloured offset print. The publication displays a series of 16 where “each initial form runs through an evolution and gets replaced by the proximate, which can be considered as a reform, a spare or a new version of the preceding one”.

In order to actually design an “abstract compilation about shapes and aesthetics,” Edition Taube’s designer and co-founder, Jonas Beuchert, decided to publish four alternate versions of the book with differing page orders and covers so that each reader can interpret Florina’s visual language for themselves.