In the early 1990s, graphic designer Paula Scher, a partner in the international design firm Pentagram, began painting maps of the world as she sees it. The larger her canvases grew, the more expressionistic her geographical visions became.

Displaying a powerful command of image, Scher transformed the surface area of our world, rendering information and data culled from headlines, maps and diagrams in madcap fields of hand-drawn typography. Paintings as tall as twelve feet depict continents, countries, and cities swirling in torrents of information and undulating with colorful layers of hand-painted boundary lines, place-names, and provocative cultural commentary.

A selection of these mesmerizing works opened last night at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, 505 West 24^th Street, NY, NY, and will remain on view through February 18^th. The exhibition features both paintings and screenprints, including several works that are being shown for the first time..

Now collected in book form, Paula Scher MAPS (Princeton Architectural Press 2011) presents thirty-nine of Scher's obsessively detailed, highly personal creations. A foreword by Simon Winchester (The Map That Changed the World) contextualizes Scher’s maps as cultural objects, and an introduction by Scher herself offers a view inside the mind and personal interests that sprouted her cartographic creativity. An added plus: the cover folds out into a poster-sized Map of the World (above).

Winchester writes, “A Paula Scher map is both detached from reality and yet at the same time becomes an entirely new reality, one that manages to be useless and essential all at once. What follows here is cartography as living art — fun and whimsical, obsessively made, and knowingly offered, lovingly, to be read… Maps such as these are never ever to be replaced by the cold blinking eyes of the GPS. Use them, enjoy them, glory in their madness.”

01132012