Preview: Imaginary Concerts by Peter Coffin

Downtown Los Angeles’s Colby Poster Printing Co. is the company behind the iconic “show print” posters that covered the city from 1946 until 2012. Often imitated, the gradient-style posters have become synonymous with concerts in Los Angeles.

Artist Peter Coffin began experimenting with the print shop’s inks, ultimately exhibiting a series of eighty text-less posters in Colby’s tricolor gradient style, allowing the viewer imagine their own dream concerts into existence. After displaying the posters worldwide, Coffin enticed a handful of artists, authors, and friends to depict their wildest concert bills in black letterpress. The result is Imaginary Concerts, which is Co-published with Printed Matter and Anthology Editions, and collects and displays over 70 submissions against the hazy, horizontal color bands encouraging the ultimate in concert fantasies.

Peter Coffin has mounted over thirty solo exhibitions with museums and galleries including the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington DC), The Barbican (London), City Hall Park (New York City), and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco). Coffin’s art can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum, among other institutions. Music looms large in Coffin’s work and mind.

There are two events planned at the LA Art Book Fair with Peter Coffin, information for both is provided below.

Please enjoy these preview images from IMAGINARY CONCERTS, Published by ANTHOLOGY EDITIONS and PRINTED MATTER.