The master is back! Gerhard Glück's fans in Basel have had to wait over 25 years for his enigmatic paintings to return to the Cartoon Museum. The artist, who was born in Bad Vilbel in 1944, will be 80 years old in 2024. The retrospective at the Cartoon Museum will show the whole of Glück, from his first cartoons in the early 1970s to his most recent works. Glück is one of the best-known representatives of comic art; he was honoured with the German Cartoon Prize in Gold in 2000 and 2005 and was awarded the Göttinger Elch for his life's work in 2017.
Whether he is taking aim at well-known works of art, global political developments or social conventions: Glück's old-masterly yet naive painting style only briefly belies the biting humour that underpins his work. Once you have travelled through Glück's charming grotesques, trapdoors open up into bizarre, often absurd situations. His pictures are populated by a very own, exaggeratedly average, middle-aged, well-to-do, unfashionable type of person. The well-ordered world of these anonymous figures is invaded by prudes, larger-than-life pigs, St Nicholas and the Grim Reaper, to whom Glück imposes his impositions. Glück's humour is nourished by such disruptions, haunting the ever-same, uneventful with fantasy and chaos.
Glück has published for example in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", the "NZZ Folio" and the "Eulenspiegel" and illustrated books by authors such as Joachim Ringelnatz. His work has also been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including at the Caricatura and the Museum Wilhelm Busch. Dieter Burckhardt, the founder of the Cartoon Museum, collected Glück's art parodies in particular at an early stage. This comprehensive exhibition thus closes a circle for both artist and museum.
Media talk: Thursday, 14 November 2024, 11 a.m.
Vernissage: Friday, 15 November 2024, 6.30 pm
Curator: Anette Gehrig