Surely the world’s greatest practicing stop-motion artist animators, the Brothers Quay have been painstakingly crafting their own unique, interlinked universe of astonishingly imagined animated worlds for over 45 years. Creating across the short, medium and long form, as well as in production design for opera, ballet and theatre, theirs is a startling cosmology, one informed and inhabited by the mystery and melancholy dreaming of Central and Eastern European artists, writers and wayward wanderers, most notably from the Polish constellation.
This March sees a gathering of works across London that articulates this extraordinary imaginary at first hand. In a London premiere – and a world first for an assembly at this scale – 23 of their immaculately hand-crafted puppet film sets will be on display in the suitably supportive environs of the main hall in Bloomsbury's Swedenborg House. It is vanishingly rare to encounter the material source of animated creativity in this way, and in a space so dedicated to metaphysical reverie.
Please take the chance to encounter these singularly atmospheric works of art at first hand and at all the scales offered. Once seen, never forgotten – they will haunt both your sleeping and waking hours in the most poetically unsettling of ways.
FREE at Swedenborg House
