The Character Walk is an open tour through numerous galleries, project spaces and other locations made temporarily available to host exhibitions, installations and performances of outstanding international character art. In a careful selection, Pictoplasma invites innovative artists and designers working with a reduced visual vocabulary of anthropomorphic shapes to present their work as part of the event. We fulfil all steps in the conception and planning of the exhibitions in close collaboration with the artists and spaces.
The Character Walk is promoted extensively in a focused media campaign and through the production of a special map locating all exhibitions and explaining the concept of the individual shows.
The Character Walk has meanwhile spread from Berlin to New York and Parts, always accompanying the Pictoplasma Festival. All exhibitions are open to the general public, entrance free of charge.
In 2010, accompanying the release of the book “Pen To Paper”, Pictoplasma presented a series of exhibitions in Germany, France and the UK, featuring original work by the key players of what was being labelled “DIY art” “fractured figuration” or “new psychedelic folk”. The revival of analogue skills had injected immeasurable visual wealth into the world of illustration, fine art and especially character design. Artists started to reject the computer and channel their creativity through spontaneous freehand drawing to create untamed, edgy and exceptional beings.
All that seemed left of our beloved cartoon faces, familiar consumer mascots and pop icon characters is a distorted, far away echo.
After its initial premiere at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in France, the Pen to Paper collection exhibited at Concrete Hermit (London), artSPACE (Berlin) and Galerie LJ (Paris), featuring the original works by Shoboshobo (FR), Allyson Mellberg Taylor (US), Seth Scriver (CA), Andrew James Jones (UK), John Casey (US), Luke Ramsey (CA), Eric Shaw (US), Thomas Bernard (FR), Lane Hagood (US), Joey Haley (CA), Swoon (USA), Kerozen (FR), Ian Stevenson (UK), Arnaud Loumeau (FR), Fia Cielen (BE), Frédéric Fleury (FR), Matt Lock (US), Ola Vasiljeva (NL), and Yu Matsuoka (JP/FR).
MORE ON PEN TO PAPER > HERE
In 2009 the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) invited Pictoplasma to curate the world’s first large-scale exhibition on contemporary character design and art. “Prepare for Pictopia” playfully explored the phenomenon and offered new and surprising insight into a growing scene of graphic designers and artists that work with a shared set of icons, opening up new contexts and correlations. The exhibition examined the contemporary vague of reduced figuration as a strategy for producing a vitalism outside established narratives. These so-called characters are reduced to the anthropomorphic function of eye contact which seems to look out from flat pictorial space at the viewer.
Besides a large number of site specific work created especially for the occasion by Akinori Oishi, Doma Collective, Doudouboy, Doma, Juan Pablo Cambariere, Rinzen, Borris Hoppek, Waynehorse, FriendsWithYou and Shoboshobo, the group show presented original artwork by: Mark Ryden, AJ Fosik, Ben Frost, Daniel & Geo Fuchs, Dylan Martorell, Edwina Ashton, Faiyaz Jafri, Fons Schiedon, Gary Baseman, Golan Levin, Hideaki Kawashima, Ian Stevenson, James Marshall, Jeremy Dower, Motomichi Nakamura, Nagi Noda, Olaf Breuning, Sam Gibbons, Tim Biskup and many more…
MORE ON PICTOPIA > HERE
