Gabriella Giandelli - Mirabile Bestiarium

Urban Landscape with Huge Animals

Everyday life and reality encounter beauty, poetry and secrets

Exhibition at the Cartoon Museum Basel: 11 June to 30 October 2022

Huge songbirds, gigantic snails, room-size storks and house-high dogs roam around abandoned cities and apartments. Silently and almost as a matter of course, they take the place of people. Could it be that everything is not as peaceful as it seems here?

The Italian artist Gabriella Giandelli’s stories, subtly drawn in coloured pencil and pastel chalks, interweave the everyday and reality with beauty, poetry and mystery. Giandelli’s almost naïve pictorial idiom, charged with dream-like, surreal, magical states, and her general abandonment of words render her works unmistakable. This magical, richly coloured parallel universe has the power to open our eyes and broaden our minds.

About the artist:
Gabriella Giandelli (* 1963) has been publishing comics since 1984, among others, in Alter Alter, L’Écho des Savanes, Dolce Vita, Frigidaire and Strapazin. She works for newspapers and magazins like La Repubblica, The New Yorker and Vanity. Her graphic novels and children’s books are published throughout Europe. She also designs fabrics, carpets, objects and watches for firms such as Alessi, Memphis and Swatch, among others.

Für diesen Bildband sind nur wenige Worte nötig, denn ihre wundervolle Bildsprache ist einzigartig. Die Bilder sind zugleich traumhaft schön und wirken sehr poetisch und haben dennoch auch eine erschreckende Wirkung. [...] Ein Bildband, der zum Nachdenken anregt und mich total begeistert hat. (Gabriela Pagenhardt von Mainberg, vonmainbergsbuechertipps, 28.06.2022)

In ihrem gerade im Christoph Merian Verlag erschienenen Buch «Mirabile Bestiarium» zeigt Giandelli, wie fantastische Wesen menschenleere Städte durchstöbern. Hier hat die humane Apokalypse längst stattgefunden. (Nick Joyce, Basler Zeitung, 15.06.2022)