El Lissitzky and the Red Wedges & Red Squares in the Graphic Design of the 1980s.

The electro-pop band Kraftwerk explicitly cites El Lissitzky as inspiration for the cover design of their 1978 album Die Mensch-Maschine. Malcolm Garrett reinterprets the red wedge from Lissitzky's famous 1919 poster for his 1979 cover design a different kind of tension by the English punk band Buzzcocks, and Neville Brody "recycles" - as he himself calls it - the red wedge for the logo of the British musician and artist movement called Red Wedge in the early 1980s.

While some people consciously quote Lissitzky visually and are inspired by his graphic and typographical work, others usually exploit the work at will without any awareness. The 1980s were a time of "visual plundering" in graphic design, as Rick Poynor describes the decade in retrospect. Victor Malsy shows a selection from his own collection of red wedges and squares.

Victor Malsy; born in 1957 in Froschhausen, trained as a draftsman and nurse, then studied graphic design at the University of the Arts Bremen. Since 1991 he has his own office for communication and design in Bremen, and relocated to Willich in 2005. Book design and publishing appearances, among others for: Dumont Buchverlag, Klett-Cotta, S.Fischer Verlag, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Carl Hanser Verlag, Verlag C.H.Beck, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Rotbuch Verlag, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Die Andere Bibliothek. Since 2000 professor for Communication Design in the field of Typography and Book Design at the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf. Research focus is the history of design and its designers. Since 2011 member of the art advisory board for the graphic design of the special postage stamps at the federal ministry of finance in Berlin. Publications, contributions and exhibitions on the topics of typography, book design and design history among others: "Kollege L. war schon prima" (1990), "Helmut Schmid: Gestaltung ist Haltung" (2006), "Filmkunstgrafik. Ein Buch zur neuen deutschen Filmgrafik der 1960er Jahre" (2007), "Helvetica Forever. Geschichte einer Schrift" (2008), "Ideenstadt Düsseldorf. Design und Werbung in Düsseldorf 1900-2013" (2013), "Klaus-Peter Dienst. Kalligrammatic Typography and Poetic Text Images" (2019), "Sound of Poetry of Sound. Der S Press Tonbandverlag und die 'akustische Literatur'" (2021). Extensive collection and development of an archive on the "Visual History of Death".