Poster House Charts Günther Kieser's Half-Century of Music Posters

Poster House in New York opens "Sculpting Sound: Günther Kieser's Music Posters" on 12 November, and it runs until 11 April 2027. The German designer built some of the 20th century's most singular music poster art, working for David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and Diana Ross and the Supremes, plus brands and art institutions. The show comes with the first English-language book on Kieser.

His style pulls from three places: sculpture, the free-form nature of jazz, and psychedelic art. That mix produced posters that behave less like advertising and more like modeled objects. It also made him the go-to designer for Germany's postwar concert circuit.

What does the exhibition actually contain?

The show spans decades of commissions, many tied to specific tours and festivals:

• Jimi Hendrix, 1969. Kieser's most famous poster, built on a photograph by Donald Silverstein, advertised Hendrix's West German tour. It has been reproduced at least three times since 1969.
• David Bowie, 1983. Bowie's Serious Moonlight tour ran 96 performances, drew 2.6 million fans and became the largest tour by any musician that year.
• Ike and Tina Turner, 1971. Kieser designed the poster ahead of their West Germany tour, a year after the album "Workin' Together."
• Diana Ross and the Supremes. In September 1968 the group released "Love Child," their 11th No 1 single on the US pop charts.
• Paul McCartney and Wings, 1972. The Wings Over Europe tour ran 9 July to 24 August, with the band driving across Europe in an open-topped double-decker bus. The German-leg poster doubled as the cover of the live album "Wings over Switzerland."
• James Brown. The poster marks Brown's first-ever European show, in Germany. An estimated 90% of tickets for his West Germany concerts went to Black American soldiers.

How did Kieser work?

He often played the music of the bands he was designing for to inspire the work. For one band he sewed and stuffed a plush doll, embroidering its name on the chest and crowning it with the black hat that became the signature of drummer Mick Fleetwood. Fleetwood named the doll "Mr Wonderful" — the title of the band's second album — and kept it in his personal collection. By May 1970, founding member Peter Green had left the group, which moved away from its British blues roots.

Why the blues posters matter

The American Folk Blues Festival toured Europe annually from 1962 to 1972, then again from 1980 to 1985, carrying Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton across the Atlantic. Kieser created the posters, programs, stage sets and occasionally album cover art for each festival, often with collaborator Hans Michel. Each poster featured an acoustic guitar surrounded by symbols of American culture.

One poster from this strand carries real political weight. Kieser designed it to encapsulate Martin Luther King Jr's essay written for the inaugural Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964. King's argument was that jazz and blues let Black Americans express their struggles against oppression and find hope; Kieser showed Black Americans dismantling stereotypes through tears in the images around the men's faces.

Another jazz poster symbolizes the deconstruction and reinvention of jazz during live performance, with musicians playing off each other.

Beyond the concert hall

Kieser's reach extended past music. For the promoters Lippmann + Rau he designed a poster for a March 1966 folk and country festival, depicting American performers in a black-and-white collage of vintage photographs — music sourced from the mountains of Appalachia and the Southern swamplands. Another Lippmann + Rau poster honored Carnival, the Catholic celebration held annually in Germany on the Sunday before Lent, featuring the Preservation Hall Jazz Band from New Orleans and the Grammy-winning Woody Herman And His Orchestra from New York City.

He also worked for institutions. For the opening of "Zeitsignale," an exhibition on BMW's turning points at the BMW museum, Kieser built a model of Marlene Dietrich from a scene in the 1930 film "The Blue Angel" — swapping the barrel she sits on for the hood of a BMW 328, produced between 1936 and 1940. And for Hessischer Rundfunk, one of Germany's nine regional public broadcasters, he designed a poster for a psychotherapy documentary on "ways out of compulsion and fear."

What does this change for viewers? Mostly, it restores a name to images people know without knowing who made them — and the accompanying book gives English-language readers their first proper introduction.