About the Exhibition

Surely the world’s greatest practising stop-motion artist animators, the Quay Brothers have been painstakingly crafting their own unique, interlinked universe of astonishingly imagined animated worlds for over 45 years. Creating across the short, medium and long form, as well as in production design for opera, ballet and theatre, theirs is a startling cosmology, one informed and inhabited by the mystery and melancholy dreaming of Central and Eastern European artists, writers and wayward wanderers, most notably from the Polish constellation.

This March sees a gathering of works across London that articulates this extraordinary imaginary at first hand. In a London premiere – and a world first for an assembly at this scale – 23 of their immaculately hand-crafted puppet film sets will be on display in the suitably supportive environs of the main hall in Bloomsbury’s Swedenborg House. It is vanishingly rare to encounter the material source of animated creativity in this way, and in a space so dedicated to metaphysical reverie.

Please take the chance to encounter these singularly atmospheric works of art at first hand and at all the scales offered. Once seen, never forgotten – they will haunt both your sleeping and waking hours in the most poetically unsettling of ways.

— Gareth Evans, series co-curator

  “a vanishingly rare encounter . . . and London premiere”

Programme

A full programme of film screenings and cultural events included in Kinoteka can be found via this link:

Other festival partners include the ICA, Barbican, BFI IMAX, BFI Southbank, the Garden Cinema and Ciné Lumière.

Bios

THE QUAY BROTHERS were born in 1947 near Philadelphia where they studied at the Philadelphia College of Art, then later in London at the Royal College of Art. In 1980 they formed Koninck with colleague Keith Griffiths and since then have produced a hybrid collection of film work: puppet animation, documentaries, interludes, commercials, and installations. They have equally designed décors for the theatre, opera and ballet as well as directing three live-action feature films. Many of their films have been inspired by the writings of authors such as Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, & Felisberto Hernández. Music is essential to their works and include the composers Stockhausen, Penderecki, Bartok, Liška, and Schnittke. In 2012 the Quays were the subject of a full retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets which included the décors from their puppet films »Dormitorium« which was subsequently seen in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Riga, Brighton, Exeter,Wrocław, Lublin, Lisboa, Jeonju Korea and now London.

Exhibition run: 18 March – 4 April 2025. Open daily Mondays to Fridays 10.00 am – 5.00 pm. Open Saturdays (22 and 29 March) 12.00 – 5.00 pm. Free admission.