The
comics part of this year’s City of Women Festival presents three
of the most talented and successful contemporary European female comic
book authors. Caroline Sury from Marseilles, Dominique Goblet from
Brussels, and Anke Feuchtenberger from Hamburg, will confront us with
an exhibition of works that tell their autobiographical and intimately
fictitious stories.
They all have academic backgrounds; they all started working in comics in the nineties; in addition to comics, they all do illustrations; they all frequently exhibit their work at festivals and in art galleries; they all conduct comics workshops and are successful at printing their own comic book albums; and they all share a rather unusual lyrical narration. What made them leading figures in the contemporary comics world is their original graphic styles. From this point of view, Caroline’s is the wildest and most systematically chaotic; Dominique’s style involves gentler lines, bordering on avant-garde expressionist paintings; while Anke’s line is the purest of the three and even more expressionistic than Dominique’s. If Caroline and Dominique focus more and more on autobiographical subjects, Anke remains firmly in her own oneirically symbolic world. Apart from their graphical styles, they are just as different in their use of colour, although all of them also excel in the aesthetics of black and white. The specifics of silk-screening makes Caroline again the loudest; Anke is a master of warm layering; while Dominique feels most at home in a world of grey with outbursts of bright red. And this is where I end my attempt at comparative analysis. In conclusion, I would like to underscore the most important fact: Anke Feuchtenberger, Caroline Sury and Dominique Goblet have each done a great deal for the development of comic-book language by experimenting with expression in comics. If anybody still doesn’t understand, let me put it like this: the names of the authors presented at the festival are written in block letters in the history of contemporary art. Don’t miss this unique opportunity for a personal confrontation with their works and words! (Igor Prassel) Dominique Goblet was born in Brussels, where she studied graphic arts, specialising in illustration. Dominique shows her work in galleries and publishes her stories in magazines and books. In general, what she seeks to create is an art of multifaceted narrative. Her painting exhibitions are just another way of telling, from frame to frame as well as in the whole gallery space, a different kind of fragmented story. Her comics question the relationships, both deep and shallow, between human beings. Dominique’s comics work, sometimes bordering on illustration, draws its essence from painting, and conversely, her paintings recall the fragmented stories commonly found in comics. As an author, she has contributed to almost the entire Frigobox series published by Fréon (Brussels) as well as to several Lapin magazines, published by L’Association (Paris). Her silent comic was published in the gigantic Comix 2000 anthology (L’Association). Her work has also appeared in the L’Association au Mexique, a new kind of travel sketchbook. Her first complete book, Portraits crachés (Fréon) was published in 1997. Her second book, Souvenir d’une journée parfaite, a complex story combining autobiography and fiction, was published by Fréon in early 2002. Along with teaching drawing and exhibiting her work, she is preparing five new projects: a book of illustrations for children (with writer Corinne Bertrand), three comic books, and the first edition of ‘project Nikita’, named after her daughter (she and Nikita have been making weekly portraits of each other since 1998).
|
   |