Shaun Tan
Pictures and books

The Australian illustrator and author Shaun Tan, who was born in 1974, has made a international name for himself with his books in a very short time. In 2008, at the comics fair in Angoulême, he received one of the most important prizes of the comics world for his graphic novel “The Arrival”, and in 2009 he received the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for “Tales from Outer Suburbia”.

His picture books are often set in a futuristic, intermediate world where the real past has left many traces. With meticulously created pictures that appeal to both children and adults, Shaun Tan tells stories of inhospitable, bizarre places of the future or of lost and regained homelands, in a style that is sometimes witty, sometimes melancholy. The exhibition presents the artist in a German-speaking country for the first time with a representative selection of original illustrations. The main focus is on his picture books, and there are also sketches and preliminary drawings and a few free works by the artist from the last 15 years.