The stories subtly drawn in coloured pencil and pastel by Italian artist Gabriella Giandelli (b. 1963) interweave everyday life and reality with beauty, poetry and secrets. In tribute to this internationally renowned artist and illustrator, who lives and works in Milan, Cartoonmuseum Basel presents a comprehensive retrospective exhibition, with original drawings and large-format works specially produced for the occasion.

Giandelli’s almost naive visual language, loaded with dreamlike surreal and magical situations, and largely devoid of words, makes her oeuvre distinctive. Animals and strange mythical creatures appear in abstracted cityscapes, while the beauty of nature is omnipresent. This is a magical colourful parallel universe with the power to open up new perspectives for us and to broaden them. Her best-known graphic novels to date, Silent Blanket (2000) and Interiorae (2015), tell of loneliness and isolation in dense memorable images. Her recent publication Australia, released as part of the Louis Vuitton Travel Books series, captures the intoxicating beauty and uniqueness of the Australian natural world.

Gabriella Giandelli attended film school in Milan and became known to a wide audience through her animated film series Milo, which was later adapted into French. In 1984, she started releasing comic strips, in comic magazines such as Alter Alter, L’Eco des Savanes, Dolce Vita, Frigidaire and Strapazin: all magazines with a broad understanding of comics, and an openness towards graphic and narrative experiments. She regularly works as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines, including La Repubblica, The New Yorker and Vanity. Giandelli has created children’s books for Italian, French and Spanish publishers, and designed patterns for fabrics, carpets, objects, watches and eyewear for design firms such as Alessi, Memphis, Alchimia, Swatch and Sottsass Associati.