The Moving Image Source Calendar is a selective international guide to retrospectives, screenings, festivals, and exhibitions.
Descriptions are drawn from the calendars of the presenting venues.
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Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets
August 12, 2012–January 7, 2013 at
Museum of Modern Art
, New York
This MoMA gallery exhibition and accompanying film retrospective will be the first presentation of the Quay Brothers' work in all their fields of creative activity. Internationally renowned moving image artists and designers, the Quay Brothers were born outside Philadelphia and have worked from their London studio, Atelier Koninck, since the late 1970s. For over 30 years, they have been in the avant-garde of stop-motion puppet animation and live-action movie-making in the Eastern European tradition of filmmakers like Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Svankmajer and the Russian Yuri Norstein, and have championed a design aesthetic influenced by the graphic surrealism of Polish poster artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Beginning with their student films in 1971, the Quay Brothers have produced over 45 moving image works, including two features, music videos, dance films, documentaries, and signature personal works, including The Street of Crocodiles (1986), the Stille Nacht series (1988–2008), Institute Benjamenta (1995), and In Absentia (2000). They have also designed sets and projections for opera, drama, and concert performances such as Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa (1991), Ionesco’s The Chairs (Tony-nominated design, 1997), Richard Ayre’s The Cricket Recovers (2005), and recent site-specific pieces based on the work of Bartók and Kafka.
In addition to their better known films, this exhibition will include never-before-seen moving image works and graphic design, drawings, and calligraphy, presenting animated and live-action films alongside installations, objects, and works on paper.
Presented in conjunction with the Museum’s Quay Brothers gallery exhibition is the complete retrospective of the film and video works of the twin Quay Brothers. Organized to encourage an appreciation of their versatility across a range of moving image genres, this series of twice-monthly screenings includes shorts, dance films, documentaries, music videos, commercial spots, and their two feature films. Never before has their distinctive visual poetry of gesture and alienation been presented in full. The series opens with screenings of MoMA’s new 35mm print of the Quay Brothers’ first feature, Institute Benjamenta, a luminous black-and-white adaptation of the novel Jacob von Gunten, by Swiss writer Robert Walser, one of the literary misfits whose work has been a major inspiration for the Quay Brothers.
Program information:
Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets
Wexner Center for the Arts
Visiting Filmmakers: The Quay Brothers
July 25-31, 2012