French artist Blutch was born Christian Hincker in 1967 in Strasbourg, where he studied art at École supérieure des Arts décoratifs. In 1988, his first short strips appeared in the magazine Fluide Glacial. His oeuvre, which is hugely diverse both thematically and in terms of form, revolves around the drawing. Blutch is now seen as one of the most important and masterful artists behind today’s new French comic. His possibilities as a drawer and painter range from the quick expressive ink drawing to the subtle freestyle painting. In his often experimental works, this artist repeatedly crosses over into abstraction or (like in his early work Peplum, a free adaptation of the Satyricon by Petronius) leaves it up to the reader to fill in the gaps by means of free association. In fact, there is hardly any subject that Blutch has not tackled and his stories inhabit all genres, be it science fiction, mystery, western, drama or comedy. In 1998, the collection of short autobiographical strips Le Petit Christian was published, bringing his childhood in 1970s Alsace to life. Blutch took this further in a second part, which appeared in Charlie Hebdo in 2008. After countless black-and-white albums, he surprisingly produced a colour album in 2002, the surreal Vitesse Moderne. Blutch has worked for numerous publishers and in a wide variety of collaborations. He has illustrated books, designed posters for filmmaker Alain Resnais and the Banlieues Bleues jazz festival, drawn for Libération, The New Yorker and Les Inrockuptibles, and worked on animations, such as the nightmarish Peur(s) du noir. Blutch won the Grand Prix de la Ville d’Angoulême in 2009, the most important European award in comics, making him president of the Angoulême International Comics Festival for the following year. The retrospective at Cartoonmuseum Basel brings together originals from albums, as well as paintings, illustrations, posters and excerpts from animations.
