Nino Bulling, "Rym,” 21 X 29.7 cm, 2017, Colour Pencil (Print)
FEATURED ARTIST: ALAIN CORBEL, NINO BULLING, ELISE ENGLER, KARLOTTA FREIER, OLIVIER KUGLER, PETER KUPER, SARAH SHAW
CURATED BY MATT ROTA
December 1st, 2020 — January 3rd, 2021
To travel in foreign lands is to be in a state of constant intoxication by the unfamiliar. It creates a heightened state of awareness. Senses that are otherwise dulled by familiarity open wide to assess new circumstances and details. In that way, traveling opens a person up completely. The presence of mind of a traveler through the intake of new information triggers an equal need to describe the newness, the bombardment of overexposure. A need to explain to yourself, to your companions, each new sensation; taste, smell, sound and sight. A need to clarify, and in a way create a new vocabulary of understanding to house the new sensations. When an artist who’s craft is, in a sense, explaining, and in the case of this show, explaining through images; drawing and painting in books and journals, the experience may be more pointed and purposeful. Not just a journey to a far away place, but one in search of a particular story, because they are artists and their skill is needed to experience and document and explain through art. In our moment in time, when travel is discouraged, and our senses are dulled through lack of exposure and by familiarity, through the work of these artists we are allowed to step abroad and relive the act of travel from a time when movement was not such a self conscious act, and foreign countries did not seem so far away.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Alain Corbel, Brittany, France,1965. He studied at the Institut St-Luc, (Sequential art department) in Brussels, where he met Eric Lambé. They have worked together since 1990 and produced Mokka and Pelure Amère, two modern comic strip magazines that have influenced many comic strip artists and publishers such as Amok and Fréon.
He lived for many years in Portugal where the majority of his books were published. In 2002 he was awarded the best Portuguese illustrator and was in 2007 the Portuguese nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Prize, IBBY.
Since 2000, he has been going regularly to all African former Portuguese colonies where he organizes illustration and writing workshops.
He works as a comic artist, illustrator and storywriter for publishers, magazines and newspapers. Since 2007, as full faculty, he has taught in the illustration department at Mica, Baltimore.
Nino Paula Bulling is a graphic novelist and illustrator from Berlin, Germany. They debuted in 2012 to much acclaim with the graphic documentary Im Land der Frühaufsteher (en: In the Land of Early Risers). They have since published numerous shorter and longer works, their most recent publication Bruchlinien (en: Fault Lines) was published through Spector Books in 2019. They live and work in Berlin.
Elise Engler was born in 1956 in Bronxville, New York, and has been a resident of New York City for most of her life. She attended Hunter College as an undergraduate and received an MFA from Bennington College on a teaching fellowship in painting and printmaking. She has made art since childhood. Her work consists of meticulous, highly pictorial drawings and paintings that capture and document the material world in all its myriad details. Her projects are large in scope, but intimate in format, and are a narrative investigation of the world seen through its innumerable, but countable, individual components, assembled in suites and series of works.
Engler has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in drawing, and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant in painting. She has been recipient of two MacDowell residencies and a fellowship at Civatella Ranieri, In Umbria, Italy. She spent 2 months in Antarctica as an awardee of a National Science Foundation Antarctica Artists and Writers Grant in the winter of 2009-2010. Her work has been written about in Art in America, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among other publications, and she has shown in galleries across the U.S. and in Europe. Her project, A Year on Broadway, was featured on CBS Sunday Morning. Elise Engler teaches at City College, City University of New York, the School of Visual Arts and for the Battery Park City Authority. Metropolitan Books (MacMillan) will be publishing a portion of her current project Diary of a Radio Junkie:1828 Days of Waking up to the News in November of 2021.
Karlotta Freier (b. 1991) is a German illustrator based in New York. Currently enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, Freier regularly illustrates for globally recognized magazines and publishers such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, Brand Eins, Greenpeace Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review and Penguin Random House. Since 2016, Freier has held solo and group exhibitions in Germany and the USA. In 2018 she was a winner of the Young Ones Award in the USA. More recently, Freier worked as a Professor of Illustration for the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou.
Olivier Kugler studied visual communication in Germany and illustration at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He is a reportage illustrator based in London, and has won many awards, including the Association of Illustrators (AOI) Gold Award in 2004 and 2008. He was overall winner of both the V&A Illustration Award in 2011 and AOI World Illustration Awards in 2015. In June 2018, his book 'Escaping Wars and Waves', won the Jury Prize of the European Design Awards and in November 2018, it won the Prix du Carnet de Voyage International as well as the Coup de Coeur Médecins Sans Frontières at the Rendez-vous du Carnet de Voyage. The book was also shortlisted for the Broken Frontier Best Nonfiction Graphic Novel 2018 as well as the 2019 AOI World Illustration Awards 2019. Most recently, Olivier was shortlisted for the British Book Design and Production Awards and highly commended in the BMA Medical Book Awards 2019.
Peter Kuper’s work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Mad , where he has written and illustrated “Spy vs. Spy” every issue since 1997. He is the co-founder of World War 3 Illustrated, a political comix magazine now in it’s 41st year of publication. He has produced over two dozen books including Sticks and Stones (winner of The Society of Illustrators gold medal), The System, Diario de Oaxaca, Ruins (winner of the 2016 Eisner Award) and adaptations of many of Franz Kafka's works into comics including The Metamorphosis. His most recent graphic novels include Kafkaesque (winner of the 2018 Rueben award) and an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.Translations of his work have appeared in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Slovenia, China, Brazil, Germany and Mexico.
Peter has lectured extensively throughout the world and has taught comics and illustration courses at Parsons, and The School of Visual Arts and Harvard University’s first class dedicated to graphic novels. He is the 2020-21 Jean Strouse Fellow at The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center.
Sarah Shaw is a comics artist, illustrator, and visual arts educator who has lived and worked internationally for the past ten years. She is a graduate of Pratt Institute's Art & Design Education program and the School of Visual Art's Visual Narrative program. Her work has been exhibited in both domestic and international solo and group shows, and often incorporates themes such as history, family, travel, adventure, and world cultures. Currently, she lives and draws in Boston, MA