Christmas 2025
The Idea
Inspired by light, color, and structure, this year's KURZ annual greeting card bears the unmistakable signature of Inge Gutbrod, an artist from Fürth and winner of the City of Fürth's Grand Culture Prize. Her luminous pieces, composed of regularly arranged wax tiles in various colors, impress with their color intensity, transparency, and multifaceted surface structure. When illuminated, fascinating structures are revealed that capture the fluid nature of liquid wax at the moment of solidification - each piece is unique.
Photo: A. Kradisch
Ms. Gutbrod developed new room installations for the large exhibition hall of the Kunsthalle Schweinfurt titled 'take a bath in my light-soaked bodies, vol. 1,' which premiered in November 2023. Among these installations is the 'Schweinfurter Raum,' which serves as the inspiration for this year's greeting card – a tribute to the interplay of light, materiality, and space.
In order to transfer this luminous work onto cardboard, the initial idea was to move away from the materiality of wax and instead focus on color, arrangement, and topology. These elements can be transferred in a convincing and sensually perceptible way using printing technology, particularly with transfer products from KURZ.
The arrangement of 5 x 5 tiles creates a balanced relationship between image size and aesthetic expression. To make the translucency of the wax tiles tangible, the inside of the card was designed with a mirror-inverted motif in light yellow and ochre tones. Since Gutbrod's light installations are often staged as standing walls that take up a lot of space, the card was also designed to be spatial - as a stable triangular structure.
The Implementation
Wax is characterized not only by its translucency, but also by a fine, matte shimmering sheen that sometimes changes color gently. These visual properties can be ideally reproduced with LUMAFIN® designs, as they also have colored reflective properties that fundamentally distinguish them from classic glossy coatings.
The topology of the wax tiles is reproduced on cardboard by means of relief embossing. In combination with LUMAFIN® as a hot stamping decoration, this creates an impressive optical depth. Since Inge Gutbrod's light works are predominantly in the yellow-red spectrum, most of the tiles were embossed with LUMAFIN® Clear. In addition, three selected tiles were embossed with LUMAFIN® Yellow on one side of the card and with a yellow-tinted holographic TRUSTSEAL® Lens on the other. While the yellow LUMAFIN® embossing creates a subtle warm sheen, TRUSTSEAL® Lens adds an unexpected but harmoniously embedded accent.
The card's surrounding frame was hot-embossed with LUXOR® 317. The fine micro embossing of its structure echoes the square grid of the wax tiles, subtly connecting the motif and the material.
The seasonal greeting card is thus the result of an artistic translation: A formal idea reinterpreted with other materials. The strict composition of the wax tiles dissolves into a playful interplay of shine, reflection, haptics, and optical irritation. With its fine, nuanced irregularities, the card appears like an artistic one-of-a-kind piece.
Printing and Finishing
Based on the artistic concept, a three-dimensional greeting card was created in several steps: First, four-color offset printing was carried out, then the frame was embossed with micro embossing in LUXOR® 317 Burgundy MTS and a stamp from our subsidiary Hinderer + Mühlich (H+M). The design of the wax tiles required several passes.
In a first step, three TRUSTSEAL® Lenses in the color Orange 109 were embossed individually. Then the other wax tiles were added as flat embossings with LUMAFIN® 799 Clear MS and LUMAFIN® 719 MS Yellow. Finally, a blind embossing was applied as a relief over the entire surface. The finished greeting card can be folded into a small work of art.
