In 2009 the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) invited Pictoplasma to curate the world’s first large-scale exhibition on contemporary character design and art. “Prepare for Pictopia” playfully explored the phenomenon and offered new and surprising insight into a growing scene of graphic designers and artists that work with a shared set of icons, opening up new contexts and correlations. The exhibition examined the contemporary vague of reduced figuration as a strategy for producing a vitalism outside established narratives. These so-called characters are reduced to the anthropomorphic function of eye contact which seems to look out from flat pictorial space at the viewer.
Besides a large number of site specific work created especially for the occasion by Akinori Oishi, Doma Collective, Doudouboy, Doma, Juan Pablo Cambariere, Rinzen, Borris Hoppek, Waynehorse, FriendsWithYou and Shoboshobo, the group show presented original artwork by: Mark Ryden, AJ Fosik, Ben Frost, Daniel & Geo Fuchs, Dylan Martorell, Edwina Ashton, Faiyaz Jafri, Fons Schiedon, Gary Baseman, Golan Levin, Hideaki Kawashima, Ian Stevenson, James Marshall, Jeremy Dower, Motomichi Nakamura, Nagi Noda, Olaf Breuning, Sam Gibbons, Tim Biskup and many more…
