Opening of the exhibition «Gerhard Glück»

The master is back! Gerhard Glück’s Basel-based fans have had to wait more than 25 years for his cryptic paintings to return to Cartoonmuseum Basel. In 2024, this artist, who was born in 1944 in Bad Vilbel, will turn 80. The retrospective at Cartoonmuseum Basel presents the complete Glück, from his first early-1970s cartoons to his most recent works. Glück is one of the best-known representatives of comic art. In 2000 and 2005, he received the German Caricature Award in Gold, and in 2017, he was presented with the Göttinger Elch for his life’s work.

Regardless of whether he is taking aim at famous artworks, developments in world politics or social conventions, Glück’s old-masterly and simultaneously naive painting style only briefly belies the biting humour with which he underpins his works. For anyone venturing inside Glück’s sweet grotesques, trapdoors open up, leading to bizarre, often absurd situations. His pictures are populated by people of a very distinct, exaggeratedly average type: middle-aged, portly and unfashionable. These anonymous characters’ well-ordered world is broken into by plump cherubs, larger-than-life pigs, St Nicholas and the Grim Reaper, whom Glück places his impositions upon. Glück’s humour feeds off such disruptions, which beset the unchanging and uneventful with fantasy and chaos.

Glück has published in ‘Süddeutsche Zeitung’, ‘NZZ Folio’ and ‘Eulenspiegel’ for example, and illustrated books by authors such as Joachim Ringelnatz. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, for instance at the Caricatura and at Museum Wilhelm Busch. Dieter Burckhardt, founder of Cartoonmuseum Basel, started collecting Glück’s parodies of artworks in particular at an early stage. This comprehensive exhibition thus brings both the artist and the museum full circle.