Julie Doucet – Une rétrospection
Musée Tomi Ungerer - Centre international de l'illustration

From April 25 to November 3, 2024, the Museum Tomi Ungerer presents “Julie Doucet. Une rétrospection“: a monographic exhibition by Julie Doucet, a Quebec artist who has been one of the most important and influential authors of alternative comics in Canada, United States, France and Germany since the 1990s. In 2022, she was awarded the Grand Prix at the Angoulême Festival for her body of work. This cult author has created a prolific body of work that extends beyond drawing to include printmaking, collage, video and poetry.

At the heart of her work is a profound desire to break away from formal social and artistic constraints. In the 1990s, through her series of autofictional comic strips Dirty Plotte, Julie Doucet brought a subjective and radical vision of the female condition to the alternative comics scene. Her descriptions of menstruation, masturbation and mental health, as well as her experiences of competition and success in a male-dominated field, opened up the possibility of situated writing for a whole generation of female artists. In this way, she prefigured autofiction as a method of empowerment: of taking power over one’s own life.

In the 2000s, Julie Doucet abandoned comics in favour of other art forms. She developed a visual arts practice in which the aim was always to reinvent the relationship between image and writing. Her illustrations and collages are images of matter, her films are studies in line, and her photocomics are images to be read aloud. She writes her poetry in the form of concrete images of cut-out words. She publishes her most recent drawings in the form of graphic essays.

The exhibition is therefore also a history of bookmaking and publishing: from the underground fanzine, through her publications in the very first comic-book publishing houses, to an experimental practice on the material form of the book, to which she has returned in recent years. Through her graphic essay, which unfolds like a Leporello, and an autobiography in cut-out words, Julie Doucet’s formal innovations go beyond the limits of what the commercialisation of books allows. In this way, she constantly renews what the political and aesthetic possibilities of bookmaking are and can be.

Curator: Anna Sailer, curator in charge of the Museum Tomi Ungerer – Centre international de l’Illustration

With the support of the Canadian Cultural Centre.