Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell: Masters of Album Cover Artwork

The pair, who founded photo-design studio Hipgnosis, created numerous iconic sleeve design for artists including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Peter Gabriel, forming beguiling, psychedelic images that have informed the work of countless designers since.

A one-day event in Birmingham next month will celebrate the work of Thorgerson and Powell, showcasing their famous images alongside nine previously unseen prints.

These include album covers for Scorpions, Strawbs and Wishbone Ash, created during the 1970s.

In the afternoon of the event, Powell will be giving an hour-long talk, unearthing stories about the process of designing the covers, and giving insights into the start of his career.

10cc fans are also in for a treat, with Powell said to be discussing how the band’s relationship with Hipgnosis first began.

Alongside showing the prints, the gallery will feature an immersive stream of images and music from Pink Floyd, projected around the walls.

Thorgerson and Powell were first approached by Pink Floyd to design a cover for them in 1967, creating 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets cover, leading to more and more commissions, and resulting the formation of Hipgnosis.

The studio was in business for the next 15 years, and was named after some graffiti the pair found on the door to their then-home.

Thorgerson said he felt the name had ‘a sense of contradiction, of an impossible co-existence, from the word Hip meaning cool and Gnostic, related to ancient learning’.

Indeed, it was a fitting title for a studio working in revolutionary ways, taking strange, photography-based mages and manipulated them into surreal collages way before the birth of photo-editing software using methods including multiple exposures, airbrush retouching, and mechanical cut-and-paste techniques.

The final pieces have a cinematic quality, hinting at Thorgerson and Powell’s background as film graduates, and setting the tone for psychedelic, weird and wonderful artworks in the years that followed.

Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell: Masters of Album Cover Artwork takes place on 22 February at St Pauls Gallery, 94 Northwood St, Birmingham, West Midlands B3