People of Print’s Gradspotters programme spotlights emerging graduate talent working in print and image-making. Our latest prospect is Liv Virnich, a Hamburg-born graphic designer and screen printer completing her BA at HBK Braunschweig, heading to a Masters at UdK Berlin, and currently working at Viadukt screen printing studio in Vienna.
Liv Virnich has spent her entire design education learning that how you work matters as much as what you make. Her practice is collective and process-oriented, moving across screen printing, typography, theatre, performance and experimental printmaking, always with an interest in what happens when people make things together.
She learned screen printing from Michael Botor at HBK Braunschweig, one of Germany’s most respected printmaking environments, and since graduating has been working for Bernadette Meisel at Viadukt in Vienna. In the autumn she starts a Masters at UdK Berlin. It is a trajectory built on learning from the right people in the right studios and on taking that knowledge seriously.
Her three projects span the breadth of what she is interested in. DIN is a typographic screen print series: one A0 edition and two A1 editions, each with unique hand-pulled gradients across 12 layers and 20 prints per edition, designed using typefaces by FLINTA-only type designers. It is rigorous, generous and slightly obsessive in the best way: a love letter to the DIN format family made available to everyone who shares that love.
Her bachelor’s thesis, Willst du mit mir arbeiten? (Will you work with me?), translates the ritual of the schoolyard yes/no/maybe note into a framework for thinking about creative collaboration. Drawing on interviews and a workshop focusing on FLINTA perspectives, the project explores how closeness, shared values, uncertainty and hope shape creative communities. The outcome is a folded poster and interview booklet, screen printed in HAL Timezone, that frames collaboration as a multi-voiced, ongoing process rather than a method to be applied.
Aufwiedergehen, a smaller typographic piece, observes farewells and daily journeys through graphic elements derived from patterned paving stones and a stair railing. Screen printed at 27 by 35 centimetres in Laica Mono, it is a work of careful, quiet attention to the visual language already present in the built world.
Together the three projects describe a designer who is deeply literate in print, genuinely committed to collective and feminist practice and already thinking about how to build something lasting. She wants to develop her newly founded graphic design collective, apply for artist residencies and ultimately build or work within a screen printing studio at an art institution. Her stated goal of contributing to the preservation of analogue techniques while developing workshops and knowledge-sharing practice is not an aspiration: it is already underway.
Website: coming soon Instagram: @livirnich
Liv’s work is technically accomplished, conceptually serious and socially grounded in exactly the right way. The DIN series alone demonstrates a level of print craft that many practitioners spend years developing. The thesis project shows a designer who is thinking not just about making things but about the conditions under which making happens and who gets to be part of it. That combination of skill, rigour and care for community is rare at BA level. Gradspotters exists to make sure that the people who have it get the support they need to build on it.
Applications are open
Gradspotters is People of Print’s programme for emerging graduates working in print, image-making and visual practice. We are looking for the next generation of printmakers, illustrators, designers and artists who are ready to take their practice beyond graduation and into the world.
Entry costs £20. Every applicant receives visibility on the People of Print platform. Selected prospects receive a full feature, mentorship, and practical support with building their practice and career. If you are a recent graduate, or know one who should be on our radar, this is the programme worth applying to.
Apply at peopleofprint.com/gradspotters
