Advanced Research Centre

ARC Public; ARCHalloween
Date: Monday 23 October 2023 - Sunday 29 October 2023
Time: 09:00 - 16:00
Venue: University of Glasgow, Advanced Research Centre (ARC), 11 Chapel Lane, Glasgow, G11 6EW
Category: Exhibitions

Come along to the ARC to view some incredible artworks by Glasgow-born comic artist Frank Quitely and German surrealist Caspar Walter Rauh. Don’t miss this opportunity to delve into the nightmare worlds that these artists create.

In connection to this exhibition, we’re also hosting a talk with Frank Quitely, plus a screening of his short film Nothing to Declare on Monday 23 October.

Background

A conference on Dark Fantasies. Aesthetics of the Nightmare from the 20th century to the present was held in the Goethe Institut, Park Circus, Glasgow on 11th-12th May 2023, with contributions on the theory of nightmares, on transcriptions of nightmares in diaries and autobiographical writings, on nightmares and mental health, and on representations of nightmares in literature, film and visual art, as well as in the new art forms of the 20th/21st centuries such as comics, graphic novels and video clips.

An exhibition of nightmare aesthetics in comic and graphic art accompanied the conference, with works by Glaswegian comic artist Frank Quitely (b. 1968) and by Casper Walter Rauh (1912-1983), a graphic artist from Upper Franconia who worked in the tradition of Fantastic Realism and Surrealism. The conference and exhibition were co-organised by Professor Sheila Dickson, SMLC, University of Glasgow, and Professor Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa, University of Galway.

The exhibition in the ARC includes all works by Frank Quitely displayed at the previous event, plus a smaller selection of works by C.W. Rauh.

About the artists

Caspar Walter Rauh (1912-1983) was a German graphic artist, illustrator and a painter who worked in the traditions of Fantastic Realism and of Surrealism. He studied art at the academy in Düsseldorf during Paul Klee’s time as teacher there. Many of his early works are haunting portrayals of the traumatising experience of World War II, which he spent as an infantryman in Poland and Russia. They are nightmares of post-apocalyptic landscapes and cities, inhabited by frightening creatures. Destruction is all around, and many objects cannot clearly be identified, losing their distinct outline and shape and reappearing in a transfigured and distorted guise.

Frank Quitely was born in Glasgow in 1968 as Vincent Deighan, but realising that, quite frankly, his work might offend his family, he hid behind the spoonerist penname. His output is vast and varied, and he has worked with many icons of the graphic novel including Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Alan Grant and Bruce Jones. In 2017 he was awarded an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow and was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021. The dream-like world he creates for The Sandman can flip to the surrealist nightmares of the X-Men, wherein Prof X is trapped inside the mind of his evil twin; childhood memories of seaborne disorientation from Flex Mentello; the terrors of The Walking Dead; the Joker’s indelible derision, or indeed the literal surrealism of Salvador Dali. Frank Quitely’s iconic clear-line creations haunt us with their evocations of nightmares that can come from physical monsters, monsters of the mind, or monsters of the everyday.

About the organiser

Sheila Dickson is Professor of German in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. Among her research interests are the history of psychiatry in Germany and the UK, and she is currently working on a co-edited publication on German dreams and dreamers in the late 18th to early 19th centuries as well as continuing the 20th-century nightmares project outlined above.

More information