Way Gone with Brothers Quay
Rung in the new year with MoMA and their dive-down-the-rabbit-hole retrospective of the Brothers Quay. On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets assembles a massive sampling of the twin siblings' work -- from their phantasmagorical stop-motion films and obsessively assembled, puppet-inhabited curiosity cabinets, to black inked book jacket designs and corporate TV commercials. It also pays considerable attention to what inspired the Quay Brothers in the first place, including a wonderful and weird corner devoted entirely to surrealist Polish poster art.
Roman Cieslewicz - Katastrofa
Bronislaw Zelek - Sult
Franciszek Starowieyski - Therese
Wojciech Fangor - Ballad of a Soldier
Jan Lenica - Laventura
Wojciech Zamecznik - Shadow Cien
Despite a rather unfortunate connection my mind immediately makes between their visual style and, err, Tool, I find the Quay Brothers to be producers of some supremely strange and stunning work. Their fine attention to detail and otherworldly world-building abilities are worthy of praise in their own right, not to mention the transfixing experience of viewing those worlds from the other side of the glass. Also, they dreamed up this bonkers French commercial for Badoit fizzy water, which earns them a bigtime a-ok sign from me.
*Thanks to Adrian Curry, whose original blog post I politely used as source material.