WK (Wolfgang Karl Gustav Kunth, born in 1950) decides against “the art” - although he is extremely enthusiastic about artistic design - and studies business administration and economics in Cologne, which is not really close to artistic creations. Nevertheless, his interest in contemporary art and his curiosity for artistic-creative design live on and will prove to be extremely beneficial and useful for his professional work soon after completing his studies.

1976

WK becomes a publisher.  Initially at Bertelsmann AG, one of the largest media groups in the world.  After just a few years on the job, WK was appointed to the position of divisional director of the “Publishing Houses and Book Clubs” division, where he was soon responsible for the business of 20 publishing houses, both financially and in terms of programming, content and design.

As a publisher, he decides on and supports many hundreds of book ideas each season. His professional life is dominated by aesthetic literature, political non-fiction, historical documentaries, biographies, current sports albums, large encyclopedias on art and culture, voluminous world atlases, travel guides and travel magazines, illustrated guidebooks, sophisticated cookbooks and precious facsimiles. Conversations and discussions with authors, photographers, proofreaders, editors, geographers and cartographers, graphic artists and designers as well as with marketing, sales and PR staff are part of his daily work.

What is particularly important to him - in addition to the necessary economic aspects: The design and layout of “his” books, atlases, magazines and calendars. As an autodidact without academic training, who has not learned the craft of art, who has not studied typography, photography, graphics and design, he provides the ideas for many thousands of book covers, book, magazine and calendar layouts thanks to his artistic design potential. 

Publishing and design creativity around the clock

His personal interest, particularly in the context of his publishing work, lies in geography and, in its graphic implementation, cartography. Enthused by the development of space travel in the last decades of the 20th century, he was the first to conceive a new generation of world atlases that combine satellite images of the Earth and the universe with modern topographical maps, thus creating a new, fascinating and previously unseen image of the Earth.
 

From then on, ‘Fascination Earth’ became a guiding principle of his further publishing work and, subsequently, a fundamental motif of his own creative artistic work, which – mostly unconsciously – characterises many of his current works.   

1995

After eighteen years, WK leaves the media group. In the middle of his life.  ‘Art’ returns and knocks again. The desire for his own creative expression. The result: impetuous works with and on rusty metal sheets, eruptive paintings on paper with chalk, oil, acrylic, ink, charcoal, graphite, red wine. Fantasies without the inhibiting barriers and constraints of publishing necessities.