Skip to main content

Quay Brothers

Artists and film-makers

Stephen y Timothy Quay, born in the US and residing in the UK for over three decades, these identical twins are at the forefront of global animation.

To these alchemists of the image, trained as graphic designers, we owe some of the best puppet films of all time.

Animations such as Street of Crocodiles (1986), The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984), In Absentia (2000) or fiction films such as Institute Benjamenta (1995), reveal the powerful influence that the rich central European cultural scene has exercised on them, particularly the work of Polish and Czech authors: graphic designers of the 50s and 60s, filmmakers and narrators like Waleryan Borowczyk, Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Jan Švankmajer and Jan Lenica, or Russians Ladislas Starewitch and Yuri Norstein.

The synthesis of these and other references, such as that of the Swiss writer Robert Walser, is exquisite in their work, sublimating and offering it to new audiences thanks to the excellence of their technique, the musicality of their images and the meticulous mise-en-scene. Admirers of Švankmajer, they are the main responsible for its position with full rights in the postmodern scene of the eighties.His latest piece is inspired by the universe of the Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández. The MoMA in New York dedicated a great exhibition to them.

They have produced with the CCCB the audiovisual piece The Forest inside the Forest (2014) for the exhibition “Metamorphosis”.

 

Update: 20 October 2016

Contents

Has participated in

Flashes of beauty

Xcèntric Archive

Concert-Screening "The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka"

A film by The Quay Brothers with pianist Mikhaïl Rudy

Through the looking glass

Sublime desire

Games and enigmas

Incoherent bodies and mechanical souls

The rebellion of objects

Fantastic tales III

Fantastic tales II

Fantastic tales I

The cabinet of curiosities

Opening of the series “Xcèntric screens Metamorphosis”

A secret order of things (with the attendance of the Brothers Quay)

Possibilities for dialogue

An encounter with Jan Švankmajer, the Quay brothers and Léona-Béatrice Martin-Starewitch, granddaughter of Ladislas Starewitch

Metamorphosis

Fantasy Visions in Starewitch, Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers