In 2014, at the initiative of Eva Linhart, head and curator of the Book Art and Graphic Design Collection until June 2025, the Museum Angewandte Kunst presented the comprehensive exhibition Give Love Back. Ata Macias and Partners. The show explored the question of what applied art can be today.

It centered on a collaboration with Ata Macias, a Frankfurt DJ, musician, and club and restaurant owner. As a defining figure in Frankfurt’s cultural scene, which combines music, fashion, lifestyle, and visual arts, Macias influenced both the selection of works and the visual design of the exhibition. This resulted in a lively dialogue between the worlds of “museum” and “Ata Macias and Partners.”

The exhibition poster designed by Sandra Doeller translated this approach into visual terms: over a text written especially for the exhibition by museum director Matthias Wagner K, the designer placed an illustration of the exhibition title by Graziano Capitta. The artist and graduate of Frankfurt’s Städelschule chose a smiley face motif that looked as if it had been painted with liquid paint. The austere black-and-white contrast intensified the formal pithiness.

The graphic design that emerged as part of the exhibition was copied many times in the years that followed. Exact reproductions or more-or-less modified versions of the motif can now be found worldwide on mugs, T-shirts, socks, bags, and sweaters—even on products from a Swedish textile company. The spread of these plagiarized versions illustrates how narrow the boundaries are between inspiration, appropriation, and copyright infringement.