François Schuiten
© Photo Edouard JANSSENS
François Schuiten is one of Belgium's leading comic strip artists, illustrators and set designers. Born in Brussels, he grew up in a family where his taste for the fine arts was nurtured and where architecture played an important role. His entire career has been marked by his passion for architecture and his vision of cities in utopian and dystopian projections. Through his drawings, François Schuiten strives to defend the architectural heritage of Brussels, which was greatly sacrificed during the Bruxellisation of the 60s and 70s.
François Schuiten studied comics at Saint-Luc in Brussels and published his first story at the age of 16. He went on to publish in the well-known magazines Métal Hurlant and (À suivre). In 1983, the famous serie Les Cités Obscures were born, produced with his childhood friend Benoît Peeters.
In Les Cités obscures, a major work of 9th Art, François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters invent a new world, as singular as it is spellbinding. This universe, oblique and mysterious, with occasional glimpses of our own, is made up of paradoxical metropolises, chimerical deserts and unfathomable oceans. She explores an imaginary world of enigmatic cities, fascinating architectural structures and mysterious characters. Her distinctive style and unique approach to visual storytelling have earned Obscure Cities international recognition and numerous awards. The series has sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide and has been translated into dozens of languages.
In 2002, François Schuiten was awarded the Angoulême Grand Prix, the ultimate accolade for any comic book author, for his body of work.
But François Schuiten does not confine himself to comics alone. He also exercises his talent across a wide range of artistic disciplines. In addition to his work as a comic strip artist, he has produced numerous illustrations and posters for various events, festivals and exhibitions.These have led to a number of derivative art prints in the form of serigraphs, lithographs, etc. He has also worked on theatrical projects (Rossini's opera La Canerentola at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie) and film projects (Taxandria by Raoul Servais, Toto le héros and Mister Nobody by Jaco Van Dormael and Les Quarx by Maurice Benayoun, at the forefront of animated cinema).
Very active in set design, he designed the Le Musée des Ombres exhibition in Angoulême in 1990 and Revoir Paris at the Cité de l'Architecture & du Patrimoine at the Trocadero in 2015. He has designed the Arts et Métiers metro station in Paris and the Porte de Hal metro station in Brussels, as well as several pavilions for World Fairs (Seville in 1922, Hanover in 2000 and Aïchi in Japan in 2005). More recently, he was commissioned to illustrate the future Pont de Sèvres station as part of the Grand Paris Express project.
François Schuiten has also designed the scenography for the Maison Jules Verne in Amiens, the Maison Autrique (Victor Horta's first Art Nouveau house in Brussels) and, more recently, the Train World Museum in Brussels.
A passionate fan of Jules Verne and his world, he worked with Pierre Matter to create a monumental bronze sculpture, the Nauti-Poulpe, which has just been installed in Amiens to commemorate the 120th anniversary of his death.
François Schuiten has also made a name for himself designing painted walls in several cities (Brussels, Lyon, Angoulême, Louvain-la-Neuve, Warsaw, Le Mans). He is part of the Scan Pyramids scientific consortium with Dassault System, with the aim of revealing unknown cavities in the Great Pyramids. He is also involved in the Red Team, a division of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces, which aims to develop scenarios devised by a consortium of authors in order to anticipate the future threats and societal challenges facing France.
- EXHIBITIONS AND MAJOR SCENOGRAPHIC PROJETCS
To find out even more about Les Cités obscures and François Schuiten's work, we invite you to visit the ALTAPLANA website.
