His drawing style is unmistakable: the clear black line he handles with such infinite variation and consummate skill, the elaborate play of shadows along the boundary between reality and the imagination. The Frenchman Marc-Antoine Mathieu is considered one of the most innovative comic artists of the present.

For thirty years he has been publishing albums that change and break the rules and codes of the genre. With precise draughtsmanship and profound linguistic wit, they show readers unaccustomed perspectives and provide insights into the enigma of things.

The exhibition Mapping Dreams: The Art of Marc-Antoine Mathieu introduces visitors to the œuvre of this exceptional storyteller and translates the reading experience of his disconcertingly surreal and labyrinthine comic-book realms into the museum interior. From 3 June to 15 October 2017, an exceptional exhibition design builds the bridge to Mathieu’s comic cosmos. Room-filling installations and adaptations of passageway and transition motifs from his works bring the intricate self-reflective / meta-reflective structures of his stories to life and turn the narrative quality and imaginative force of his comic œuvre into an intense sensorial experience.

The show also presents a selection of more than fifty original drawings, and thus a cross-section of the albums produced by the draughtsman, writer and scenarist since the early 1990s, as well as unpublished sequences from his current work in progress. Bronze sculptures and animated films by Mathieu are also on view, broadening his narrative palette by offering alternative mediums of access to his œuvre.