Museum Ludwig Puts Six Artists Into RIMOWA's Most Thoughtful Souvenir

A sticker does two things at once: it reproduces an image and records a decision about where that image should live. On a suitcase it also joins a long vernacular history of hotel labels, shipping marks and personal souvenirs. Dziewior's selection uses that double role intelligently, turning twelve museum works into objects that can leave the institution and acquire another context.

The book protects the project from becoming a sheet of unexplained decals. Artist quotations and a curatorial foreword ask the reader to encounter the work before peeling it away. That pause is important because the transformation is not neutral: scale, surface and permanence all change when an artwork becomes an adhesive multiple.

• Twelve stickers reproduce two works by each participating artist
• Quotations and a foreword preserve context before the stickers are removed

Carol Bove's sculpture, Wade Guyton's printer-mediated images, Roni Horn's attention to identity and place, Julia Scher's surveillance installations, Rosemarie Trockel's challenges to hierarchies of art and craft, and Haegue Yang's mobile, sensorial assemblages do not resolve into one house style. That friction is the point. The book presents contemporary art as a set of different methods rather than a luxury mood board.

Trockel also provides a meaningful Cologne connection: Museum Ludwig holds her work within a collection deeply engaged with post-war and contemporary art. Yet the project is not a survey of the museum's collection, and readers should not infer that every sticker reproduces a work owned by the institution. It is a director-curated commission made with RIMOWA.

• Artists: Bove, Guyton, Horn, Scher, Trockel and Yang
• The range spans sculpture, digital production, surveillance, textile critique and installation

RIMOWA named flagships in Beverly Hills, New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, London, Paris and Cologne. Copies were complimentary rather than sold as a standard accessory. The ten-city list gives the project global reach on paper while still requiring proximity to a luxury store.

Our verdict: this is one of RIMOWA's more convincing cultural commissions because travel is embedded in the form, not pasted onto the theme. The missed opportunity is public access. A downloadable catalogue, museum reading room copy or online presentation of the twelve selections would let the curatorial argument travel farther than the sticker book itself.

• Distribution was complimentary at ten named flagship stores
• Best feature: the format changes the work while acknowledging that change