Here we delve into the creative practise of Wysocka / Pogo, exploring the central themes that define their practice. We also discover the inspirations and influences that shape their unique work and reveal insights into their innovative yet somewhat secretive printing methods.
Magdalena Wysocka [b.1987, Poland] and Claudio Pogo [b.1978, Germany] are a Berlin based artist duo who have been working together since 2016. With backgrounds in printmaking and photography, Wysocka / Pogo’ s work bridges a variety of related mediums, from large-scale printed canvas works to handmade photobooks. Their practice is centred around collecting and re-contextualising found imagery. We hope you enjoy learning more about this prolific duo and their unique artistic journey…

[Above] High Life no.5, 2023 | Wysocka / Pogo
Custom Risograph print process, oil on raw canvas
So how did your partnership as an artist duo begin, and what motivated you to merge your practices?
Magda | We met when I was doing my internship with Claudio’s publishing company, Pogo Books. and were working together for a couple of months back in 2012. It was a busy summer, which gave us a good idea of how well we work together, but we didn’t plan anything for the future at that point. I still had to finish my degree and wasn’t even sure which part of the world I’ll be living in. Then a couple of years later life brought me back to Berlin and we gradually came back to the topic of working together. Claudio at that point wanted to build a studio which would allow him to print and bind hardcover photobooks in-house and I was really interested in the D.I.Y. spirit of this plan, as my printmaking background aligned with this way of working. So it all started to take shape and in 2016 we officially launched our imprint Outer Space Press. Working together on photobooks started our partnership. Our works on canvas came later as an expansion of our practice, although we realised that they are a combination of types of works we have been creating and experimenting with for years before we even knew each other.

I’m not happy with the way culture is touching me, 2013 | Magdalena Wysocka
Xerox-Transfer on Canvas
Claudio | I think both of us have our own love and hate relationship with photography. Before I studied photography I used to be a photo lab technician. I was trained for absolute technical perfection. The concept of the perfect C-print of the “perfect moment” — this notion of photography never quite aligned with my own understanding of the medium. I never found fulfillment in the conventional approach of systematically exploring a photographic theme; it quickly became monotonous. Instead, I was more drawn to pushing the technical boundaries of the medium itself, formulating questions about its underlying principles. For instance, I created large, kaleidoscopic works with 8mm cameras, studied time based art, went on to study cinematography, and through all these paths and detours, I eventually arrived at the medium of the photobook.
It was 2015 that my path crossed again with Magda, who was at the time working with Xerox transfers. I was deeply impressed by the ease and radicalism with which Magda deconstructed these prints in order to get them on large scale canvases. We started to explore Risography and began working on our first collaborative projects together.

Rocket, 2005 | Claudio Pogo
Super-8mm Filmstrip collage
I imagine agreeing on a creative path to take can be challenging at times. How do you navigate difference in opinion and to what extent is that process important creatively?
M | We don’t really tend to disagree much, neither of us really enjoys any type of conflict, so we naturally don’t go to that place. However we discuss how we both imagine each piece we create in detail, even though our printing technique allows us to control the results only to a certain extent. We brainstorm a lot, constantly show each other images that we found, or tell stories we read, that spark an idea that might become a book or a series of print works. In more practical terms, Claudio is used to ‘cleaner’ work, reproduction quality, perfection in alignment, which all originates from his work in photo-lab, publishing and film. I am more used to experimenting with texture and print quality. This is a great combination of skills which challenges us both and enhances our work, rather than creates conflict. We do have our own responsibilities while printing, tasks that somehow naturally got assigned in the very beginning, starting with the very first piece we created and stayed like that. We like following the ‘never touch the running system’ rule.

Untitled, 2018 | Wysocka / Pogo [First Artwork]
Custom Risograph print process, oil on raw canvas

In what ways do you think your practices compliment each other and what outside influences have most shaped your artistic approach?
M | We are both of course sums of our experiences and education paths. For me, one of the biggest influences was actually discovering Claudio’s publishing PogoBooks whilst studying. It was a true revelation to see that art doesn’t need to deal with heavy or sad topics to be taken seriously. The amount of humour and wildness I’ve seen in the photography he was publishing truly changed my outlook on art in a very profound way back then. Artists who do intelligent and fun work are always so inspiring for me, like a breath of fresh air.
C | For me a very early influence were the polaroid works of David Hockney. I loved his cubist thinking about photography. He basically took photos sequentially and pasted them together in large scale pieces. He managed to break out of the medium, showing multiple angles shot at different times, creating collages that gave the finished works these cubist Perspectives.

Kasmin, Los Angeles, 1982 | David Hockney
Polaroid collage
How do you select the images used in your artworks? Is there a narrative or thematic thread that guides these choices?
M | A very loose thread for our collections is the use of photography in different contexts. Usually these photographs come from obsolete places, where their role was to carry knowledge or information. Most of them are books, but not only. We love amateur photography, so we also collect prints, negatives. A huge resource for us is science, which very often comes with a bonus of an open copyright license. Recently we have been working a lot with very old photography, from the late 19th to early 20th century. We love photography being transformed through time, but also different print processes. For one of our books titled ‘only the plants will ever know’ we used found black and white slides, which pictured rephotographed pages of a porn magazine. We loved the idea of working with that material, to give it even more layers by scanning and reprinting it in a very hands on process we invented, to make the prints resemble these silverish, old slides. Imperfections in photography are obviously something that we very strongly gravitate towards. The series of our print works titled ‘Pot Plants’ for example comes from a little unassuming booklet from the 80’s titled ‘Topfpflanzen’, which shows photographs of different plants along with phone numbers of different flower shops around Berlin where one might find them. We liked the limitations that gave us: to create a series of works from this limited material we have in front of us.

Pot Plant no.30, 2024 | Wysocka Pogo
Unique artworks, custom risograph print process, hand stitched canvas prints
How much of your time is spent researching a project or a body of work?
C | It’s difficult to generalize. We’re always working on multiple projects simultaneously. We often stumble upon things, and then we each initially work in our own directions. When a project becomes more defined, and it becomes clear, for example, that there’s enough material to form a book, I would say we spend a few weeks, maybe a few months, researching and gathering all the key materials. For instance, for about a year now, we’ve been researching the story of a direct descendant of Vlad Tepes (the second son of Vlad Dracul), the person on which Dracula was based on. The so-called “Vampire of the Dachauer Moor” spent decades researching his own lineage, and there are some strange publications from the 1970s related to this. He also maintained an archive of self-made booklets, meticulously documenting stills from erotic films of the 1920s. We are in possession of a few of these very rare publications, which will serve as the basis for our upcoming book “And Then There Was the Night”.

Wysocka / Pogo at work in their studio in Berlin
What inspired you to create Outer Space Press, and how does publishing books and prints complement your studio practice?
C | The medium of the photo book was a strategy for us to break free from the problems of the “single image” or the “single moment.” Years before Outer Space Press, I had been publishing photo books with and by other artists, under the imprint Pogo Books. I’ve always found it exciting to edit the works of other artists—drawing out new connections or narratives through my own interventions. This led to the publication of many books and zines, which I hand-crafted in the beginning and deeply loved doing. After years of publishing, the collaboration with Magda to create OUTER SPACE PRESS marked a return to DIY prinicples. However, at OSP, our own artistic practice always came first. Today, in essence, we continue to edit photos taken by others. Our work lies in the research and narrative transformation of found material—both in our books and in our canvas works.

What drew you to risograph printing originally and what restrictions does it set you? Can you see benefits to this in some ways?
C | We are still deeply drawn to the idea of the unique artwork. There is something powerful about the stance that each piece exists only once, drawing attention to the technical reproducibility of the medium. This idea is inherently embedded in the DNA of photography itself, and then amplified by the printing process we use, which was also designed for quick, mass reproduction. At the same time, it presents a clear statement about our books, which are published in limited editions ranging from 25 to 300 copies. I acquired my first Risograph printer in 2012, inspired by publications from the Swiss publisher Rollo Press, which had already released extremely charming Risograph printed photo-booklets by artists like Linus Bill, Stefan Marx, and Erik van der Weijde in 2007. These were mostly colourful monochrome booklets and a total inspiration for me. My first Risograph was a second-hand machine—basically on its last legs—but perfect for learning the ropes of the process. Shortly after, I bought my first two-color machine and, in 2013, released a total of 10 publications under the title Claudio Pogo – “The Archives”. These A4 sized booklets were found photos printed in monochrome, duotones, and full color. Through this project, I learned a great deal about photo reproduction with the Risograph. We perfected our technique for four and five colour printing with Magda’s book “ROZE” in 2018.

Wysocka / Pogo | Artist studio, Berlin
Your work embraces unpredictability and imperfections which is unusual for many artists working with photography. The results often lead to a much more painterly aesthetic. To what extent are you able to control these ‘happy accidents’ and how much planning and sketching goes into each piece?
C | The Risograph is a primitive stencil printer with a large number of limitations. Originally designed for office environments, it prioritizes speed—quantity over quality. For high-quality photo printing, it is utterly unsuitable. Challenging the Riso and breaking its limitations has always been a challenge for us. Essentially, everything we print with the Risograph goes against the very nature of the machine. Our large-format canvas works, however, are still just the tip of the iceberg. For these, we’ve spent years developing our own methods, which we intentionally choose not to fully disclose.
M | Each of our works on canvas needs to be planned in a certain amount of detail. We decide on format and scale as well as proportions of the grid and composition of each piece. These are often very intuitive decisions. We built our studio and publishing, because we needed to feel that we are able to control every step of the process of making each copy of our publications. The entire spirit of our print works was to free ourselves and experiment more. Certain unpredictability of the result is the core of these works, however it is a real challenge to let go of our need to control the process entirely.
You have mentioned in the past that your work is a reflection on the passage of time and context, as well as machine-made replication vs. hand-made interpretation. Could you elaborate on this for us?
M | We work with found photography, so the passage of time is a part of the reason why we choose archives as raw material for our works. Earlier we were speaking about the context in which these photographs were taken, or placed. This is something we always look really closely into and analyse. We like to give photography, which lost its intended role and meaning a new life and a new context. A good example of this way of working is our ‘dead pages’ series, where each issue is our (re-)interpretation of one of the vintage books, magazines or print ephemera we found and collected into our library. Its format is reminiscent of a magazine and in terms of size, exceeds that of the other books in our catalog. Each issue of ‘dead pages’ exist as a copy reprinted infinite amount of times as an open edition, but also as an original, one of a kind piece or series of pieces, for example book pages pinned into objects, “Bravo” magazine poster spreads from the 80’s, or an office folder full of mail order slips for erotica from the 60’s rearranged into minimal collages.
The machine made replication vs. hand made interpretation refers more broadly to our canvas works, as it is closely connected to our unique work with Riso. As Claudio mentioned, we go against what this machine was invented to do, by using a very hands-on process to print on canvas. The imperfections and errors this technique creates, adds more layers to the life of each photograph we choose to work with.

These large scale artworks are relatively new to your practice as a whole which seems to have been dominated by your hugely successful photobook releases over a number of years. What projects or themes are you currently exploring, and how do you see your work evolving in the next few years?
M | Looking at our early works from some years ago one might notice that in the beginning our printing method was quite limited in terms of texture, and our focus was still very much on the reproduction of a photograph. We feel like the directions we want to take in the future are a bit more abstract, painterly, expressive. The balance between what one can and cannot see within an image is something we want to explore more.
C | It is relatively new for us to publicly showcase and offer these works for sale. However, behind the scenes, we have been developing them for many years. Our first canvas pieces are dated 2018. There are several series in our portfolio that we continue to work on consistently. The large-format “Lone Pines” for example is a series of 130 variations of the same photograph. This series will accompany us for several more years to come. New series are also emerging. “In search of birds,” for instance, is a body of work we’ve just begun, inspired by a book of the same name that we recently discovered in Tokyo.
Our printmaking techniques are also in a constant state of evolution. Additionally, we are currently working on two new books together—”ff” and “And Then There Was the Night.” These ongoing explorations reflect our commitment to pushing the boundaries of our practice, where each new work leads to new possibilities, both in technique and in conceptual depth.

Cave, 2023 | Wysocka / Pogo
Custom Risograph printing process, oil on canvas
For a full catalogue of available work from Wysocka / Pogo
OR for general enquiries, contact:
tom@opendoors.gallery

Wysocka / Pogo portrait © Lily Cummings
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