Following the artists' previous series of life-size puppets in
Die Schmutzigen Puppen von Pommern, this new publication presents a collection of one hundred sixty-four small puppets, each having a unique look.
In 2012, thirty life-size puppets were made from jute and straw.This number grew to fifty-four in the course of 2013. This series of puppets was called Die Schmutzigen Puppen von Pommern, after a region extending across northern Germany and Poland. In the spring of 2015 it was decided that a large number of small puppets were to be manufactured from the same material, providing that each should not exceed 35 cm and have a totally different character from one another. A team of six people worked on this series for about 3,000 hours in a small workshop at the canal in Brussels. The undertaking was completed on November 13, 2015. The result was one hundred sixty-four puppets. They were presented at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis, in Rome, and all of them are in this book. The title, I Piccoli Puppazzi Sporchi di Pruppà, is after a small hamlet in the southeast of Italy, not far from the town of Stilo.
Published following the eponymous exhibition, Sant'Andrea de Scaphis, Rome, from November 21, to December 19, 2015.
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys have been working together as an artist duo since the end of the 1980s. Their photographs, drawings, objects, and videos—steeped in black humor, critical (self)-reflection and overlapping reality, fiction and suppressed history—play with notions of the superficial and banal.
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys's art casts a merciless perspective on reality. Through their numerous artistic approaches, the artist duo visualize their imaginings of the parallel world inherent within the modern human psyche, along with how it manifests itself in the everyday aspects of life and civic conformity. Everything from work, leisure, and family, to social class, masculinity, and marginalization are envisaged through convening an unlikely cast of nonprofessional actors, family members, friends, beards, objects, and mannequins alike, often in banal, homespun settings rife with awkward power dynamics.
