{ths} aka Thomas Schos­tok, o cómo la colisión entre la tipografia y la imagen define para siempre la manera de ensanchar los margenes del diseño gráfico

{ths} aka Thomas Schos­tok com­bines exper­i­men­tal cre­ativ­ity and intu­ition in his work which exudes a raw, bom­bas­tic, provoca­tive style. He uses adult images as a tool to express an idea that is com­mon to all his work: dirty is beauty. {ths} works at the cross­roads of art and graphic design. His stu­dio is based in Essen, West Ger­many. In 2002 Schos­tok co-founded, together with Ste­fan Claudius, The Cape Arcona Type Foundry, a type foundry that pro­duces and dis­trib­utes dig­i­tal typefaces.

The artist lives and works in Essen. Some­what incon­gru­ous with his cur­rent career, he started out sell­ing bath­room tiles before set­ting up his own stu­dio in 1999, from where he works on projects both home and abroad. He has never stud­ied art or design and his method is not based on any pre­con­ceived idea. His graphic design, col­lage, typog­ra­phy, illus­tra­tion and paint­ing chal­lenge con­for­mity, bore­dom, clichés which abound in the world of design and he mocks nearly every stereo­type there is.

His desire for free­dom of expres­sion and inde­pen­dence is self-evident. For his project enti­tled Beast Mag­a­zine, 2001, Thomas Schos­tok dis­trib­uted his work for free in PDF for­mat, not a ban­ner or spon­sor in sight, just artists and design­ers who were invited to par­tic­i­pate, pro­vid­ing a per­fect exam­ple of how tech­nol­ogy can pro­vide alter­na­tive means of publication.