Vernissage — Gerhard Glück: The Simple Life

Cartoonmuseum Basel
© gerhard glück, "vincent is stealing sunflowers again," 1990
Friday, 15 November
18:30-21:00

The master is back! Gerhard Glück’s Basel-based fans have had to wait more than 25 years for his cryptic paintings to return to Cartoonmuseum Basel. In 2024, this artist, who was born in 1944 in Bad Vilbel, Germany, will turn 80. The retrospective at Cartoonmuseum Basel presents the complete Glück, from his first early-1970s cartoons to his most recent works.
Regardless of whether he is taking aim at famous artworks, developments in world politics, or social conventions, Glück’s old-masterly and simultaneously naive painting style only briefly belies the biting humor with which he underpins his works. For anyone venturing inside Glück’s sweet grotesques, trapdoors open up, leading to bizarre, often absurd situations. His pictures are populated by people of a very distinct, exaggeratedly average type: middle-aged, portly, and unfashionable. These anonymous characters’ well-ordered world is broken into by plump cherubs, larger-than-life pigs, St. Nicholas, and the Grim Reaper, whom Glück places his impositions upon. Glück’s humor feeds off such disruptions, which beset the unchanging and uneventful with fantasy and chaos.
Glück has published in numerous newspapers and illustrated books by authors such as Joachim Ringelnatz. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, for example at the Caricatura and at Museum Wilhelm Busch. Dieter Burckhardt, founder of Cartoonmuseum Basel, started collecting Glück’s parodies of artworks in particular at an early stage. This comprehensive exhibition thus brings both the artist and the museum full circle.
On this evening, there will be a public opening of this exhibit from 18:30-21:00; entrance is free and no registration is required.

Website
cartoonmuseum.ch/en/veranstaltungen/opening-of-the-exhibition

Where
Cartoonmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Vorstadt 28
4052 Basel

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