Century Guild brings legendary multi-media artist Dave McKean to America for an extremely special and extremely limited engagement, presented at the historic Portage Theatre in Chicago! Nitrate and Kinogeists will display both Century Guild’s inventory of historically significant and undeniably beautiful silent film posters, most of which have been lost and unseen by the public before now, as well as McKean’s latest paintings from his haunting current body of work, Nitrate, inspired by the silent era of cinema.
The two-day event features screenings of silent films that have inspired McKean, live performers, and other special surprises to be revealed. Friday the 17th begins with an artist’s reception at 6pm and concludes with a showing of F.W. Murnau’s 1926 Gothic masterpiece, Faust at 9pm. On Saturday, there will be a special screening at 9pm of Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman’s feature film for the Jim Henson Company MirrorMask with McKean himself introducing. McKean’s rarely seen short films will precede. Admission is $20/ day, 6pm- midnight.
Original artworks and limited edition prints of both Dave McKean’s artworks and the rare silent film posters on display will be available for sale, as well as the exhibition catalogue “Kinogeists” with text by Thomas Negovan and introduction by Dave McKean.
Dave McKean lives and works in Kent, England. His style has become inescapable to anyone cognizant of pop culture: he has illustrated and designed covers for the most respected comics of the late 20th century (The Sandman, Arkham Asylum) designed, illustrated, and photographed over 150 CD covers (The Rolling Stones, Tori Amos, Alice Cooper) and created imagery and designs for ad campaigns (Nike, Kodak, BMW) and magazines (The New Yorker, Mojo, Playboy). He has illustrated children’s books written by acclaimed writer Neil Gaiman (Coraline), has worked on film and book projects with Iain Sinclair, John Cale, Jonathan Carroll and Stephen King. He was a conceptual artist on the Harry Potter films and developed the film MirrorMask with Neil Gaiman for the Jim Henson Company which he also directed.
Century Guild, established in 1999 by art historians Thomas Negovan and Stuart Tomc, specializes in brokering Art Nouveau and Symbolist art and objects 1880-1920 to museum collections. The Chicago Tribune listed them as one of the must-see exhibits in Artropolis 2009.
For more information, please visit www.centuryguild.net
