Barbara Wojirsch, The Female ECM Album Cover Innovator
Date
Barbara Wojirsch was born in 1940 in Germany. Not much is known about her early childhood. She is a graphic designer known famously for developing the visual style for album covers released by ECM Records.
She graduated from the Stuttgart Academy of Fine Arts, and moved into advertising as a career. She initially identified as a painter, and quit advertising because she soon realized that she could not “tell people things that aren’t true.”
She started working for ECM Records in 1970 in collaboration with her husband Burkhardt. The couple jointly signed their work B & B Wojirsch until her husband's untimely death in the mid 1970s. She continued to work for ECM until her retirement in the mid 1990s. By this point, she had designed over 200 covers for ECM's recording artists including Keith Jarrett, David Holland, and Steve Reich.
Her iconic cover art was published as the book 'ECM - Sleeves of Desire' in 1996. Her aesthetic approach to album cover design was rooted in modernism and minimalism, along with her distinct handwriting style featured in many of her designs. hile moving typographically between the conservative sans serifs and painterly lettering, Wojirsch always remained fiercely loyal to her modernist roots.
Her designs display both photographic imagery and inventive typographic design, ranging from hieroglyphic inspiration to Cy Twombly-esque abstract scribbles.
