LE PETIT MIGNON

Le Petit Mignon is proud to currate his first exhibition abroad featuring a selection of works by artists and grafic designers involved in the underground art scene in Europe. Most of them were, at some point in the past, invited by Le Petit Mignon to present their work on the walls of Berlin based record shop Staalplaat and offered their contribution and their printing skills to a still expanding series of publications released by Le Petit Mignon.

While Japan is technologically one of the most advanced nation in the world, the country is extremely isolated and communications quite often seem to stop at its borders. This paradoxical and unfair phenomenon has been amplified by the nuclear disaster occurring in Fukushima last year. Through the sensibility of Europe based artists transcribed on paper, this exhibition aim to overcome the language barrier and distances, build and maintain an alternative communication bridge and open doors to future engaged collaborations between Europe and Japan.

On this occasion, Le Petit Mignon also wants to encourage Japanese youth to rise against consumerism, build an alternative society and get involved in actions against the criminal politicians governing their country who, just one year after Fukushima’s disaster, keep on lying and endangering the safety of Japanese people.

Both exhibitions will feature deviant art, comic illustrations, screenprints, books & more by following artists and publishers:

Guillaume Soulatges has been drawing and working in the field of printing for 10 years. Co-founder of  «Stratégie Alimentaire» (Eating Strategy), a publishing company active in Paris between 2002 and 2008, Soulatges henceforth releases his books by the renowned publisher Le Dernier Cri. He also self-produces fanzines in a DIY spirit. Soulatges is currently collaborating with  Nadia Agnolet in the field of Contemporary Art and working on a book with Berlin based comic drawer and artist CrippaXXX Almqvist to be released in next Spring.

The recurrent themes in Soulatges’ work deal with banality and monstrosity, both considered as a single notion. He uses pictures he reproduces following a scrupulous technique which still leaves space for accidents, resulting in distorted but credible images. Soulatges refuses the usage of any imaginative world and build his work on a repetition principle, on what has been seen before. But these familiar images are also filled with doubt, humour and anguish.

For his first solo exhibition in Berlin, «Horses», a selection of original drawings, screen prints, comic strips, gig posters and old and new sketches will be displayed. Pornographic scenes, family meals, landscapes, animals and anything but horses will be presented side by side.

James Unsworth opens his first Berlin solo exhibition this November featuring over 70 finely detailed ink pen drawings displayed within large wall paintings.

Fueled by research into the history of grotesque art, inversion and incongruity, Unsworth’s drawings deal with the fundamental subjects of life, death and sex.
On one level they are an honest attempt to explore man’s civilising of himself beyond his nature, on another they are depictions of juvenile erotic grotesque nonsense.

The unifying motif in this exhibition is the depiction of shit, the paradoxical element that like knowledge itself both fertilizes and poisons.

On one side lies the rich man’s discourse, which associates the poor with the vile, the vulgar, the corrupt – in other words, with shit. On the other side lies the poor man’s law, which suspects corruption within luxury and wealth at the source of stench.

- Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, 1978

London-based artist James Unsworth graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2006 and has since gone on to exhibit extensively within the UK and Internationally, including solo exhibitions in London, Paris, Sydney and Tel-Aviv.

He has exhibited alongside Andy Warhol, Peter Blake, Keith Haring,Jake and Dinos Chapman, Chris Ofili, Gavin Turk, George Condo and Olaf Breuning.

Following Daisuke Ichiba and Yasutoshi Yoshida exhibition in April this year, Le Petit Mignon is proud to host again selected works by artists and graphic designers of the Tokyo underground scene. Currated by extreme laptop musician and manga writer and designer Maruosa, “Kibun” will open on Friday September 23rd in the presence of some of the artists, featuring Live Painting, Djs and Live Act(s) (Dj Kwatsch, Michail Stangi -Aera Boy-, MSG).

“What image do you have of Japan?

Through this exhibition, the values that you see as representative of Japan will be transformed. Real low blow art (Low Blow Art) of Japan is coming to Berlin, and not just the Otaku scene that you might expect.

Life has been very unstable since the big earthquake, but we will maintain consistent power by reflecting this huge negative energy.

Ladies and gentlemen, please feel our current “Feelings (KIBUN).”

「あなたは日本に対してどのようなイメージを持っていますか？」
今回のエキシビジョンであなたの価値観はアップデートされるでしょう。
“オタク”という言葉ではひとくくりに出来ない、日本のリアルローブローアート(Low Blow Art)が ベルリンに集結します。

大地震以降、私たちは不安定な環境での生活を強いられるようになりました。
しかし、その巨大な負のエネルギーを跳ね返すくらいのパワーを私たちはこれからも持ち続けるでしょう。

皆さん、今の私たちの”気分(KIBUN)” を感じ取ってください。

“Mullin Mallin is an exhibition that will primarily be focusing on the collaboration between the duo P. Larsson and L. Nilsson behind the Hockey Rawk moniker.

Hockey Rawk started in 2006 on the Swedish Island of Gotland and now have a catalogue of 36 releases which includes CDs, tapes, books and zines with their drawings and collages. “Creativity and fun” is some sort of motto for the gruesome twosome. Some of these releases have been collaborations, some have been solo works. Mullin Mallin will consist mainly of collaborations: collages, drawings, screen prints, puppets and various forms of weirdness.

Mullin Mallin means, if I’m not misinformed, “jumbled” or “higgledy-piggledy” in Finnish, and can been seen as some sort of (hidden) theme for the exhibition.”

The exhibition will be opened on June 18th in the presence of 3 of the artists and end on July 21st.

Works on display are by two French DIY collectives and silkscreen studios, Catoblépas (Paris) and L’Auberge Floue (Marseille): original drawings, paintings, silkscreened posters, record covers and books where profanity meets destruction and psychedelic universes.

In the past few years, aside from numerous self-published graphzines and limited hand-printed artbooks, their works have been released on the renowned French underground publishers Le Dernier Cri, Les Requins Marteaux and Stéphane Blanquet’s United Dead Artists. The following artists will take part of the exhibition: Sam Rictus (aka Doombishop), Jurictus Necato, Patrick Lombe, Fabien Lopez, Thierry Cheyrol, Judex and Freddy Duries.

Wet Cartoons is a retrospective show celebrating 5 years of Drippy Bone Books zine and comics publishing. Started in 2007 by artists Kristy Foom and Mario Zoots as a way to catalog the underground art scene happening in Denver, Colorado and other cities in the US, over the years it’s become a strong platform for collaborating with artists involved in underground comics, illustration, video, music, and design. Keenan Marshall Keller, a comic artist based in Los Angeles, joined Foom and Zoots in 2008. Each artist prints and pays for the publications they release under the hood name Drippy Bone Books. All editions are small run varying from 10 – 100 copies. Living in different cities, publications are now released from Los Angeles, Denver and Amsterdam. The name Drippy Bone Books was inspired by the comic Oops Goops (2006) drawn by David Magdelano and Brian Bamps of Los Angeles.

Wet Cartoons refers to the looseness of the Drippy Bone Books publishing project, and how it’s a liquid mirror on some contemporary underground communities. The show will feature books from the Drippy Bone Books archive and video art and prints from Kristy Foom, Mario Zoots and Keenan Marshall Keller. Publications still available will be for sale.

Wildsmile studios is a Dresden-based network project, which operates a fine manual screenprint and promotes a variety of projects such as the International Sticker Awards or the art space C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts.
In the last 5 years the posters and propaganda for the events of the in-house sound system R.I.Z.L.A and other diverse and manifold artistic on-and-off productions are designed screen-printed there. Because the archive is currently being renovated, it was decided to outsource the posters and prints, without further ado, to the rooms of Berlins Le Petit Mignon (Staalpaat store). The move of the collection is accompanied by caribbean folklore music.

Die Veranstaltung „Angura – Experimentelle Kunst und Musik aus Japan“ soll Vertretern der japanischen Undergroundkultur die seltene Gelegenheit bieten, ihre Arbeiten in Berlin zu präsentieren. Hierzu findet eine Ausstellung in der Galerie Le Petit Mignon in Neukölln, sowie ein Konzertabend im ausland in Prenzlauer Berg im November statt.