Centre Pompidou, one of the world’s leading museums, has acquired a series of designs by thonik for its permanent collection.

Design Curator Cloé Pitiot put forward a proposal to the Centre Pompidou’s board, curators and acquisitions committee after seeing thonik’s exhibitions in 2010 in Galerie Anatome and the Institut Néerlandais, and a presentation in the Centre Pompidou. The museum has collected thonik’s work for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2006 onwards), Centraal Museum Utrecht (1996 to 2006), the MARTa Herford Museum (2003 to 2007), the Venice Architecture Biennale (2008), the Dutch Socialist Party (SP, 2005 onwards) and De Appel Arts Centre (2012 onwards).

The Centre Pompidou is interested in thonik’s work because it wants to explore and display its own communications in relation to those of other museums. At the same time, Cloé Pitiot researched Jean-Philippe Lenclos, an important designer and colourist who made huge graphic wall paintings in France in the nineteen-sixties. Pitiot sees a kinship between Lenclos’s work and thonik’s. Two thonik projects are discussed in the recent book Supergraphics (Sebastien Hayez, Unit Edition, 2010), which also contains extensive evaluations of the work of Jean-Philippe Lenclos and of Lance Wyman’s designs for the 1968 Olympic Games.