As a visual designer, Karl Gerstner leads the double life of a graphic designer working on commission and an artist working on his own. In the realm of the constructive, Gerstner´s work is quite unique. He never composed pictures in the usual sense but in algorithms from which-independently, so-to-speak-more and more possibilities develop. Eugen Gomringer calls him "perhaps the most comprehensively systematic artist in contemporary art." After Gerstner´s analysis of Marcel Duchamp´s last painting Tu m´ and his Review of 5 x 10 Years of Graphic Design etc., Hatje Cantz is now publishing Review of Seven Chapters of Constructive Pictures etc. In each chapter, Gerstner describes the creation process of one painting. The fifty years he has been working as an independent artist span his early "serial pictures" from the fifties, participation objects which include the viewer as a co-designer, the "color forms" which were created on the basis of a color-and-form model developed by Gerstner, as well as his most recent works in which Gerstner transfers the basic principles of fractal geometry to painting. (English edition available ISBN 978-3-7757- 9151-9) The artist: Karl Gerstner, born in 1930 in Basel, has gained international fame as a graphic designer and artist. Numerous solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad, including participation in the Kassel documenta in 1964 and 1968, and the Venice Biennale in 1986. Exhibition schedule: Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, November 9, 2003 - February 22, 2004