A look back at some of our favourite art gallery identities

Off the back of our post this week on Julien Lelièvre’s proposed museum and gallery identities, we got to thinking about some of the many excellent projects of this nature we’ve covered in the past. A trawl through the archives turned up a whole host of gallery and museum identities – from the very well-known to the enjoyably leftfield – and so we felt the time was ripe for a romp down memory lane. If there’s any you think we’ve missed (or you just want to tell us how WRONG we are) then you can use the comment thread below.

This work from Pentagram partners Michael Gericke and Eddie Opara was one of the very first things we posted this year and it’s not hard to see why. Their comprehensive visual identity for the newly-expanded space was confident and considered, with star billing going to the two 3D wordmarks the duo developed for the museum’s railings.
www.itsnicethat.com/articles/pentagram-cooper-hewitt

I absolutely love this work by Base for Munich’s Haus Der Kunst. Developed in 2012, it uses an uneven wordmark as the basis for a smart, flexible identity which manages to feel fresh and authoritative at the same time. It particularly comes into its own on the right angles of the gallery’s roof.
www.itsnicethat.com/articles/haus-der-kunst

Malleability is a popular concept when it comes to gallery identities, allowing as it does designers to play off the changing nature of exhibition programmes and the like. It crops up here in a very simple form, with Tony Brook and his Spin team creating three slightly different wordmarks around which the look and feel is developed.
www.itsnicethat.com/articles/spin-sim-smith

No list of this ilk would be complete without Experimental Jetset’s 2013 identity for the Whitney Museum in New York. Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s idea of art and instruction, the look was intended to be “design as instruction” as it would be implemented by the museum’s in-house team. The flexible “w” divides the space and it also creates various containers in which text or imagery can live.
www.itsnicethat.com/articles/whitney-museum-identity

I’d forgotten about this until I started researching this piece but I’m very glad I rediscovered it. While some museum/gallery identities are built on complex concepts this is simplicity itself. Finnish studio Tsto took the architecture of Helsinki’s Taidehalli art and design museum (below) and built the visual treatment around its interesting t-shaped facade, with clear and communicative results.
www.itsnicethat.com/articles/tsto-1

You might expect Marina Willer to feature in this run-down for her work with Tate but I decided to look at her more recent, and perhaps more divisive (in every sense of the word) work for the Serpentine Gallery instead. Again that idea of iteration comes into play, with an aperture breaking text, imagery and the wordmark to create a neatly responsive identity.
www.itsnicethat.com/articles/pentagram-serpentine

A little bit of a cheat as this identity is for a three-year revolving programme of exhibitions at the National Gallery of Denmark rather than the gallery itself but it’s my list so roll with the punches. Anyway it’s a terrific idea that uses the familiarity of the “x” to play around with various aesthetic treatments. It looks great in the gallery and on the printed collateral, giving each show its own identity under a cohesive whole.
www.itsnicethat.com/articles/bolaget