Mapping Dreams

Marc-Antoine Mathieu is considered one of the most innovative comic artists of the present. For 30 years he has been publishing albums that change and break the rules and codes of the genre. With precise draughtsmanship and profound linguistic wit, they show readers unaccustomed perspectives and provide insights into the enigma of things.

The exhibition Mapping Dreams: The Art of Marc-Antoine Mathieu will introduce visitors to the œuvre of this extraordinary storyteller and translate the reading experience of his disconcertingly surreal and labyrinthine comic-book realms into the museum interior. From June 3 to October 15, 2017, an exceptional exhibition design will build a bridge to Mathieu’s comic cosmos. Room-filling installations and adaptations of passageway and transition motifs from his works will bring the intricate self-reflective / meta-reflective structures of his stories to life and turn the narrative quality and imaginative force of his comic œuvre into an intense sensorial experience.

The show at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main will also present a selection of more than 50 original drawings, and thus a cross-section of the albums produced by the draughtsman, writer and scenarist since the early 1990s, as well as unpublished sequences from his current work in progress. Bronze sculptures and animated films by Mathieu will also be on view, broadening his narrative palette by offering alternative mediums of access to his œuvre.

Mathieu’s comic protagonists are explorers in a barren imaginary world, stoically pursuing their paths through changing topographies. Overpopulated, walled-in cityscapes, sometimes bursting at the seams, and endless vacant landscapes made of gorges, loops and swirls mutate with every step as in a dream—or, indeed, a nightmare—denying the reader a sure footing. All the while, Mathieu playfully shuffles and reshuffles the mix of language, image and action, calling into question their function for our consciousness. Anything and everything can become material for the storyline: the four complementary colours popping up abruptly to shake the hero’s worldview to the core; the vanishing point which, once lost, sends the protagonist off on a search for perspective; even the pages themselves, out of order, torn from the binding or missing altogether, posing riddles to the hero and the reader alike. Mathieu constantly involves his works’ recipients, for example by having them don 3-D specs to accompany the characters on a journey to the third dimension. Or he abruptly intertwines narrative and reality, for example when protagonist Julius Corentin Acquefacques’s excursion takes him right into the artist’s own world by way of a spiral that pops out into real space at the turn of a page.

The exhibition is being carried out in co-production with Frankfurt in French – The 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair with France as the Guest of Honour.

Director: Matthias Wagner K
Curator: David Beikirch

Press contact: Dorothee Maas, T +49 69 212 32828 / F +49 69 212 30703 / presse.angewandte-kunst@stadt-frankfurt.de