Tomi Ungerer: Cul de Sac 29. April 2016 - 25. June 2016

There is a rare kind of person whose entire existence culminates in an enormous creative output. Tomi Ungerer is this quintessential “Mr. Output” par excellence.  He is a master of many diverse disciplines in the visual arts; his insatiable curiosity, playful mastery and independent path through life fuse into an artistic phenomenon that delights people from all walks of life. Now in his mid-eighties, he is as active as ever.


Ungerer is internationally renowned as an ingenious draughtsman, provocative graphic designer and author of countless illustrations, caricatures, advertisements, posters, children’s’ books and art books. Meanwhile, his lesser-known work in the mediums of collage and sculpture has increasingly attracted the attention of the art world in recent years. This comprehensive body of work stretches back to the 1950s and consists mainly of colourful cut outs from photographs and magazines recombined on paper, or assemblages of everyday objects such as tools and toys. These “reinventions” demonstrate Ungerer’s unique ability to apply the simplest interventions in our visual world in order to couple great humour with moral dilemma. Ungerer has the ability to almost instinctively find the single hidden cut within the commercial motif, or the simple rearrangement of everyday objects that has the power to subvert our habitual expectations in the most compelling way. The results not only force the viewers to laugh and to think in new ways, they also force them to reconsider their own role in society.


The Kunsthaus Zürich and the Folkwang Museum Essen are currently honouring the outstanding artistic quality of that body of work with the solo exhibition; Tomi Ungerer “Incognito”.  At Gallery Weekend 2016 the Michael Fuchs Galerie presents exclusively a selection of the artist's “œuvre libre” for the first time in Berlin.