Monday, 10:00am
10 February 2025
The real thing
For three days only – a London exhibition of Dafi Kühne’s extraordinary posters

The second week of February 2025 is ‘Dafi Kühne week’ in London. The engaging Swiss poster designer is coming to the UK capital for an exhibition in central London from Wed 12 to Fri 14 February 2025. Though the workshop at New North Press and his Type Tuesday talk for Eye are now both sold out, everybody’s welcome to what promises to be a memorable show.
The venue for the three-day poster exhibition, entitled ‘The real thing’, is 12 Bride Lane, in a space to the left of St Bride’s main (road-level) entrance from 10am to 6pm. All posters are for sale and admission is free.
Neil Webster (@jaysdisplayservices) installs the window display at 12 Bride Lane, London. Photo: Sam Edwards.

Tunnel IV. Poster for Tunnel-Glarus, a performance venue in Glarus, east central Switzerland, printed from modular linocut letters and fresh cast Ludlow hot metal slugs, 2024. 70×100cm and two of 35×50cm

‘The real thing’, a ‘forest’ of posters for sale at 12 Bride Lane. Photo: JLW.
Kühne is familiar to Eye readers from several reviews and articles and also ‘What now? What next?’, our online Type Tuesday on 9 March 2021 during the pandemic, hosted by the Eye team and featuring Dines of Studio Blup, Malika Favre and magCulture’s Jeremy Leslie. The next issue of Eye (108) will include a report from Kühne’s London trip.
Tunnel V. Another letterpress poster for Tunnel-Glarus, printed from modular linocut letters and fresh cast Ludlow hot metal slugs, 2024. 70×100cm and 35×50cm

As Ross Shaw explained in a review of Kühne’s book True Print in Eye 94, Kühne works with ‘not only the traditional materials of letterpress on “obsolete” proofing presses, but also throws in lasercut MDF, plywood or plexiglass, linocuts, photopolymer plates and even fridge magnets. His visual wit and use of texture as well as type seamlessly straddles digital and analogue processes – whatever is appropriate for the job.’
Kühne is a master showman, too. In Eye 100, the late Jan Middendorp hailed Kühne’s ‘instructive and entertaining’ videos (on YouTube and Vimeo) that reveal the intricate and ingenious processes behind his spectacular posters.
Dafi Kühne’s show ‘The real thing’ takes place at St Bride Foundation, 12 Bride Lane, off Fleet Street, London EC4Y 8EQ, UK from 12-14 February 2025.
Poster for the 2023 exhibtion ‘Repair Revolution!’ at Museum
für Gestaltung Zürich. Hand-printed in eleven print runs from hand-cut linoleum and a small metal type tag line. 89.5×128cm.

New edition of a motif developed during Kühne’s 2014 residency at The Arm in NYC, and hand-cut from linoleum in 2021. 70×100cm.

12 Bride Lane, with Eye’s Simon Esterson just visible beneath the window graphics.

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