AWAKE IN THE DREAM WORLD: The Art of Audrey Niffenegger

The author of her bestselling debut novel 'The Time Traveler's Wife', Audrey Niffenegger is a visual artist and a faculty member at Columbia College in Chicago. As well as strange self-portraits and recent drawings on the themes of birth, death and books, Niffenegger's art is a vital part of her vision, cultivating a captivating narrative exclusively through pictures to deal with life, mortality and magic. Her fantastical body of work is reminiscent of renowned pen and ink predecessors such as Edward Gorey, Aubrey Beardsley, Egon Schiele, Edward Dulac and Horst Janssen, but with a brutally honest and unapologetically strange female perspective. Her works on paper, lithograph and aquatints reflect the often surreal narrative of her books, whimsy alongside anxiety and loneliness, probing darker corners of the human heart and mind. There is the skeleton torso above a giant elongated dress of roses entitled Black Roses in Memory of Isabella Blow, Skeletons Enveloping Naked Women, two very small waists with a skeleton to one side and a corseted woman (armless) in a colour drawing, a beautifully rendered self portrait with Philip Treacy Hat and many other self portraits with a nesting bird on top of her head in the section entitled States of Mind. Our favourites are her Adventures in Bookland, with figures reading or being tossed into a wonderland and images from her books The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress, with captions such as 'He was a butterfly collector and tried to capture her', and 'All the books were about Napoleon; being a moth, she ate them all.' With introductory essays on her art, magic and dreamworld, and a useful chronology and exhibition checklist. 75 full colour plates, many double page including book illustrations, plus images used through the essays, this is a very glamorous 120 page 24.8 x 28.6cm publication with heavy paper and colour.
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