Berger & Föhr

Berger & Föhr is the collaborative practice of Todd Berger (b. 1975, Chicago, IL) and Lucian Föhr (b. 1988, Boulder, CO). Working in shared authorship since 2002, they treat partnership as both method and subject: a long-duration collaboration shaped by systems thinking, reduction, and iterative, process-driven making. Their work spans contemporary art and design. Their art practice focuses on geometric abstraction across machine-assisted drawing, printmaking, painting, and occasional sculpture, informed by their parallel work developing identity systems for institutions and brands.

Berger & Föhr work with formal restraint and compositional rigor, using process as a way to think—method and mindset. Anchored in material testing and system-building, they set conditions, define variables, and refine procedures through iteration. Across mediums, the work is produced through calibrated relationships between hand, tool, and system.

In the recent series Graphite Gradients and Color Gradients, machine-assisted drawing builds tonal and chromatic fields through repeated passes and controlled shifts in pressure, density, timing, and overlap. Composition is grounded in geometric abstraction—precision layout, proportion, and optical structure. Color is treated as an active compositional variable, selected and deployed for intensity, contrast, and interaction across the field. In their design practice, they minimize chance; in their artmaking, they create space for it, embracing a degree of human-to-system variability within a predetermined framework. Small deviations register the conditions of the artists, the studio, the instrument, and the process at a given time.