Design Gruppe Pentagon @ the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Cologne
...Established, more or less, formally in Cologne in 1985 by Gerd Arens, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, Reinhard Müller, Ralph Sommer and Meyer Voggenreiter, Pentagon, or perhaps more accurately put the five Pentagonia* as individuals and collectives of varying composition, were important protagonists in the development, advancement and dissemination of so-called Neues Deutsche Design, NDD, that moment in 1980s West Germany that saw a new generation of creatives challenge, question, disrupt and corrupt both contemporary aesthetic, functional, material understandings and also the German design tradition, for all that more recent tradition as dominated and informed by the likes of Bauhaus, the inter-War Functionalists, or the post-War gute Form disciples such as those who congregated at the HfG Ulm... In the early 1980s Wolfgang Laubersheimer, Ralph Sommer & Reinhard Müller arrived via different routes in Anton Berger's Sculpture class at the Kölner Fachschule für Kunst and Design, the former Kölner Werkschule, and where, in addition to developing their position to and understanding of art, they began cooperating on commercial projects, for all shop fitting projects, and for all projects realised in context of the company Unikate established in 1982 by Laubersheimer and Sommer...
