Georges Schwizgebel Exhibition

December 8th 2008—January 2nd 2009, Kinodvor. City Cinema.
Exhibition Opening: December 8th 2008 at 22:00, Kinodvor

The fifth edition of our international festival of animation film hosts an exhibition of world renowned Swiss artist Georges Schwizgebel. Schwizgebel's visual images have been attracting the attention of global television, cinema and gallery audiences for more than three decades. The author's painting technique of applying acrylic colours and oils on cels (fourteen frames per second) has become his unmistakeable artistic signature. A special trait of his personal artistic style is the free, yet deliberate use of colour, a frequent use of geometrical shapes and an exploration of space and light. Virtuoso Georges Schwizgebel's images are wonderfully mobile and textured, his composition formally elegant. Each cel is freshly repainted with the characters and settings. He is a master conjurer whose images form a bewitching choreography. The animator's eye guides the painter's hand, and vice versa.

Internationally acknowledged as one of the most extraordinary masters of painted cel animation, his films, whilst varied in subject matter, combine formal explorations of movement and spatial relationships, usually within a narrative framework. They are also notable for the dynamic interplay of music and picture. His films reveal a plastic universe, one that surprises us with its efficient and economical use of lines while demonstrating a real sense of animated motion. In this Swiss filmmaker's unique style a few deft brushstrokes depict a character, create an atmosphere, construct a world. Schwizgebel's films, often inspired by musical structures, embrace all the arts - architecture, theatre, dance, literature and painting.

Schwizgebel's acrylic images are at the same time the original panels used in the making of his animated films, as well as independent visual art pieces in their own right. Although it was animation which brought him international acclaim, we firmly believe, that his original visual animated paintings will offer the audiences of the Animateka International Animation Film Festival an insight into the cotemporary Swiss visual art as such.

EXHIBITIONS & RETROSPECTIVES
1986 Exhibition of Studio GDS in Musée Gruyerien, Bulle (Switzerland)
1987 Retrospective in Nürenberg (Germany)
1992 Set for the "Children's King", Théâtre du loup, La Comédie, Geneva, Fresco on a Building-House in Geneva, Exhibition of Studio GDS in Galerie Papiers Gras, Geneva (Switzerland)
1994 Exhibition and retrospective in Stuttgart (Germany)
1995 Retrospective in Tokyo and Osaka (Japan), Retrospective in Galerie Regardes Moderne in Paris (France), Exhibition in Galerie Papiers Gras, Geneva
1996 Exhibition in Jardin Botanique and Galerie Papiers Gras, Geneva
2000  Retrospective, Anthology Film Archive New York (USA)
2005 Retrospective exhibition, Exeter Phoenix Galery (UK)
2007 Exhibition at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival (France)
2008 Retrospective exhibition, Cinémathèque québécoise (Canada)