MŒBIUS Retrospective

at Max Ernst Museum Brühl

15 September 2019 until 16 February 2020

The Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR is showing an exhibition of visionary worlds by the eminent French comics illustrator and scenarist Jean Giraud (1938 – 2012), who attained international fame under the name Moebius. Mœbius explored the spheres of dreams and science fiction and inspired films by George Lucas, Ridley Scott or Hayao Miyazaki with his design of an archaic-looking future. In his stories, utopian architecture and futuristic, mega - metropolitan cities teeming with people meet desert landscapes and shamanistic travels through space and time.

Mœbius blurs the boundaries between the genres of comic strips and art. With his immense power of imagination, he created a constant flow of surreal worlds with his precisely placed lines. For decades he created iconic figures like the warrior Arzak, Major Grubert or the space travelers Stel and Atan. Together with them he also sends the viewers on adventure trips into the infinite worlds of his imagination.

The exhibition with approximately 450 works is devoted to Mœbius’s extensive oeuvre and his complex picture stories: Beginning with his notebooks (“carnets”), in which he concentrated the fundamental ideas of his image production, and continuing via the scenically structured series of comics, sketched drawings, abstract paintings, up to his popular printed graphics, the spectrum of his fascinating art of drawing is spread out before our eyes. This exhibition of the work of Mœbius is the result of an exclusive cooperation with Mœbius Production.

The museum guests can experience the whole spectrum of Mœbius as a drawing genius. That is why the exhibition also shows many media facets of Mœbius' work. There is a large-format mural for each of the eight thematic areas, which can be digitally animated with a smartphone and a special app. 

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