Why is Irma Boom’s work relevant for the MoMA collection?
Quite simply, her work epitomizes the very best in design – graphic, book, or otherwise. It manifests itself in books, apparently, but every single book is a memorable explanatory/celebratory object for which being a book is just a pretext for existing. Even in very complex projects like her SHV Think Book Irma is both elegant and economic with her design choices. And she has pioneered and been successful in a field – design at large – that, even now, is still struggling for gender parity.

What is your relation to Irma Boom work? Do you have personal favorites among her work?
I have many favorites among Irma’s work, and we have most of her work in MoMA’s collection. I just took a look at our database at the museum just now in order to reminisce, and it made me so happy to see the bold, experimental covers of Irma’s books (we have about 100 of them) staring back at me like old acquaintances. For example, we are proud to have her masterful tome for Sheila Hicks’s exhibition that happened at the Bard Graduate Center here in New York in 2006 (Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor). The book has the most gorgeous, tactile rough-cut deckle edges, and a pure, white cover that is quite sublime.

Perhaps my particular favorite, though, is a very personal one: the design of the catalogue for a really seminal exhibition for me at MoMA, Design and the Elastic Mind in 2008. It was great to have a chance to work together. In the acknowledgements for the catalogue I thanked Irma for her “hyper-elastic mind” and called her out as “one of the most inventive and perceptive designers in the world, able to straddle space and time to produce an amazing visual synthesis of ideas.” I think I said it pretty well in 2008, so I’m going to let it stand!

Tell us about your first meeting with Irma Boom.
It feels like I have known Irma forever – when you asked me this question I tried to cast my mind back to our very first meeting, and I simply cannot. So my answer must be “forever,” which is a very happy thought.

Photo: Marton Perlaki for The Aston Martin Magazine

Tell us about your first meeting with Irma Boom?
Hans Ulrich Obrist first introduced me to her. »We urgently need Irma to design the catalogue for the Fondation Louis Vuitton show«, he wrote. She came to my studio, in Berlin. We talked about the show and when she came back to the second meeting, she brought with her a mock-up for the catalogue that included changes that reflected exactly what we had been working on for the exhibition, even though she could not have known what we had changed – it was a magical connection.

What was your relation to Irma Boom work’s before this project?
I had heard about her work and about her how she works on books as objects, focusing on the book in terms of its performativity. The doing is in the book, rather than the book presenting something that has been done.

What part of Irma Boom’s work do you find most relevant today?
She takes the content she works with very seriously. She looks at what the artworks do and brings that doing into the book, and that constitutes the core of the book. Irma is daring, non-compromising in a charming and convincing way. Although it is often a cliché to say that someone is passionate about what they do, I believe it is entirely accurate to say that Irma is truly passionate about following a design idea from beginning to end in the face of whatever challenges that may arise.

How was the process behind the catalogue and your cooperation?
Irma is a great thinker and it was inspiring to see how she thinks through design. I can’t wait to do another book with her.

Photo found here.