Tim Burton Exhibition Returns to Prague: A Showcase of 600 Works from the Director’s Career

After ten years, the work of Tim Burton will appear again in Prague. From May 1 to the end of September, 600 works from the entire career of the filmmaker and director can be seen in the Municipal House. The exhibition entitled “Returns” mainly shows how Burton works – he mainly presents storyboards, sketches, photographs and film puppets.

The work included two rooms in the Town Hall. According to the exhibition architect Martina Kárová, the first one “usually looks like a gallery”, the second one is designed more interestingly. The organizers decided to place the film puppets in large plastic balls with smaller glass peepholes. So the visitor sees them in their original intended environment, illuminated and decorated. Not only does this arrangement transport one directly into Tim Burton’s work, the plastic areas also give evidence to the hall and somewhat copy Burton’s aesthetic impression.

“You have the feeling that you are looking directly into the film,” explained the creators of the show with the idea of ​​”planets” in which there will be puppets from Burton’s famous works – monsters from the comedy Mars Attacks or heroes of the of darkness. A dead bride is hiding.

Burton has been influencing Hollywood with his unique visual style for over five decades. It successfully combines horror with the beauty of B movies, paranoid visions of alien invasions and monsters mixed with crazy comedies and romantic love for everything that changes from normality.

An important aspect of the show shows that even Burton had to deal with his own otherness. His phantasmagorical work, which according to artist manager Brandi Pomfret was also inspired by the painter Hieronymus Bosch, was not understood for a long time. In the Town Hall, you can see the rejection letter in Burton’s book manuscript or his first work of art, which he created at the age of fourteen: The Flying Saucer and the Aliens. He was not successful at school.

Burton grew up in Burbank, California. “I spent most of my time watching movies and shows about monsters and drawing whatever came into my mind… When he started visiting museums later, he was surprised that he had the same feelings about them as he had about monuments and graves. “There’s a quiet, charming, yet electrifying atmosphere in these places. They are full of tension, mystery and discovery – they connect life and death together,” Burton tells Czech visitors, explaining the basic principle of his work – the intermingling of the worlds of the living and the dead. dead

“Burton looks at these phenomena with humor and comical ingenuity. He will return the dead to the world of the living, send the living to an early grave, the Martians to Earth, and an unwanted baby that looks like a penguin, with an empire built in the sewers. And why not? After all, the dead are distinguished from the living mainly by the circles under the eyes and their worse physical condition,” wrote the organizers of the show.

The results also include the latest works from Burton’s work, including the successful Wednesday series. The organizer of the exhibition is Art Movement, a company that has, for example, the successful exhibition World of Czech Animation, but also the first Tim Burton exhibition in the Czech Republic, which was seen by more than 100,000 visitors in 2014.