Jochen Gerner lives and works in Nancy, where he graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art. Since the mid-1990s, he has developed a multi-faceted work with as many numerous and eclectic references as the visual art territories he explores. He is mostly known for his early picture books, published by L’Association and Le Rouergue, at the instigation of Olivier Douzou, then director of the children’s collection. At the same time, his comic strips for the press (Les Inrocks, Libération, Le Monde, New York Times) quickly earned him international recognition…
At the beginning of the 2000s, his work took a new direction, in particular with the release of TNT en Amérique (published by L’Ampoule). In this book, he experimented with the “blackening out” of certain parts of Tintin in America by Hergé (known as “caviardage”, in French), an exercice which became one of his trademarks, and which broadened the possibilities of his visual language, allowing him to gain a foothold in the contemporary art field—still rather hermetic to comic book authors at the time—since this series of drawings was purchased by the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, thanks to the Anne Barrault Gallery, which still represents him today.
Since then, he has freely tackled more or less established comic book icons (Franquin’s Spirou, Morris’ Lucky Luke, Hergé’s Tintin…), school maps, cinema posters or cheap aged periodicals (Panorama du feu, Abstraction (1941-1968)).
This wonderful diversity (illustrations for children’s books, comic book drawings, graphic experiments—including Marseille Panorama Polaire, published by Fotokino) was at the heart of “Sciences plastiques,” the first exhibition we organized in December 2008, at the Montgrand gallery in Marseilles (École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille). His drawings, which are frequently gathered in series, are widely exhibited and sometimes published, at L’Association in particular. Jochen Gerner has a true talent for smoothly crossing artistic borders, going from the Fiac art fair to the children’s section of bookshops with an exhilarating ease.
