Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets

Description

Identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay are internationally renowned moving image artists and designers who for over thirty years have been in the avant-garde of stop-motion puppet animation. Creating work in the tradition of Czech surrealists Jan Svankmajer and Jiri Trnka, Russian animator Yuri Norstein and Polish animator Walerian Borowczyk, they practice a design aesthetic influenced by Polish graphic artists such as Jan Lenica, Roman Cieslewicz, Franciszek Starowieyski and Henryk Tomaszewski. Since 1971, they have produced over forty-five moving images, including features, music videos, dance films, documentaries and signature personal works, and have designed sets and projections for opera, drama and concert performances. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art - the first presentation of the Quay Brothers work in all their fields of creative activity - this richly illustrated publication presents their betterknown films as well as previously unseen moving image works and a little-known body of works on paper, including graphic design, drawings, typography and notebooks for films.

They are miniature dioramas, packed with amazingly intricate details, and are clearly meant to be taken as self-contained artworks in themselves. We can also see some of the puppets that have been moved about on these sets. Amorphous as the Quay universe may sound in such an account, there is an underlying tenor to their art. It is, one might say, the meeting place of the macabre, the tormented, and the fantastic.--Sanford Schwartz "The New York Review of Books"