I Love Deix
Anniversary Exhibition
17.02.2024-02.02.2025
Seventy-five years of Manfred Deix! Take delight in your favorite illustrations, vitriolic highlights, and long-unseen works by the enfant terrible of the caricature scene. Manfred Deix (1949 - 2016) would celebrate his 75th birthday on February 22, 2024. To mark the anniversary, the Karikaturmuseum Krems is dedicating a special exhibition to the Austrian artist.
Caricature that isn’t biting, drastic, or edgy makes no sense to me. I have often been accused of poor taste and brutal humor. Who, if not a satirist, should call things out for what they are?
This Multitalented Artist will Never be Forgotten
Graphic artist, cartoonist, and poet: Manfred Deix can safely be described as a multi-talent. The Lower Austrian is best known for his vitriolic cartoons. Unlike any other, Deix was adept at peering into the depths of the Austrian soul, shocking with his art, and shaking up social taboos. Countless solo exhibitions and publications attest to his popularity, as well as the expression Deixfigur, a term with its own entry in the Duden German dictionary for a ridiculously distorted caricature of a person, or the first Austrian animated film ROTZBUB – the DEIX Film (2021).
"Der Katzenkönig" finally is back in its original glory and other vitriolic delicacies
Showcasing over sixty original works, this jubilee show will take you on a foray through Manfred Deix’s favorite illustrations and central themes. On view will be highlights such as Katzenkönig, the king of cats, presented once again in his original glory after a number of years, or the renowned naked dancer Nackttänzer Fritzi Lichtermann. The West Indian cat shaped like a cube, drawings of dogs and their owners or of the Easter bunny provide a glimpse of Deix the animal lover. Frequently encountered in the cartoonist’s work are various contemporaries such as painter Hermann Nitsch or politician Jörg Haider. That the artist himself was a passionate smoker is revealed in several works in the form of so-called cameo appearances.
Illustrated poems featured in the exhibition shed light on Deix’s literary talents. Extraordinarily gifted, the artist and his work have continued to have an impact even after his untimely death in 2016. Excerpts from ROTZBUB, the first fully-animated Austrian feature film, as well as documentary material on the new takeover of Luna Luna—an amusement park with contemporary art that Deix and other artists were involved in—attest to this.
Curators: Gottfried Gusenbauer, artistic director of the Karikaturmuseum Krems, and Anna Steinmair, curator of the Karikaturmuseum Krems