Summer in the City
Strasbourg, France. July 2019A vibrant summer of events are now taking place centred around Tomi's work and private collections in Strasbourg, with two shows currently on view and also being honoured as part of a special "slow-life" illumination project called Hortus that features images from Jean De La Lune along the riverside buildings projected each evening, from July till September this year.
The exhibitions now running in the city include Tomi Ungerer the European til November 3rd at the Tomi Ungerer Museum.
Tomi had a deep attached to the idea of Europe, with the values of justice, tolerance and humanism represented by the city being dear to his heart. Alongside this was the particular importance of the Alsace region in the creation of post-war European, ideas he also portrayed with a critical vision of the subject, particularly when targeting Europe's weaknesses. The original illustrations of the book Europolitain (1998) will be presented here for the first time in their entirety. They are put in context by a set of Tomi Ungerer drawings against violence and totalitarianism from the 1960s to the present day.
The second show is held in CEAAC in conjunction with the Tomi Ungerer Museum and follows a unique theme and form as it collects and shows for the first time the wonderfully eclectic collection of toys from Tomi Ungerer.
Tomi was a passionate toy collector. The first toy in his collection, a small mechanical boat, was given to him in 1960 in New York. For nearly forty years, he grew a collection of a few thousand objects, some of which were donated to the Museums of the City of Strasbourg. Some of them are on permanent display at the Museum of Decorative Arts and the Tomi Ungerer Museum - International Illustration Centre. The exhibition focuses on one of the major themes of his collection: transport.
About a hundred objects are on display, including vehicles of all kinds, from cars, planes, boats, railways, trucks and other more unusual forms.In addition, CEAAC presents six contemporary artists for whom play and toys are major themes in their work. Among the artists who applied for this exhibition project, six were selected whose proposals provided a poetic and critical echo to the various cars, trucks and trains from Tomi Ungerer's toy collection. The selected artists are Daniel Depoutot, Morgane Kabiry, Joseph Kieffer, Min Jisook, Patrick Nardin et Simon Nicaise.
More detailed information can be downloaded here including the bios of the six artists involved.