Aimée de Jongh

From Saturday October 5, 2024, Kunsthal Rotterdam will present a retrospective exhibition of the award-winning graphic novel author, illustrator and animator Aimée de Jongh (1988). Living in Rotterdam, De Jongh is one of the greatest talents in the international comics world. Her books have been translated and read worldwide and she has received major awards and nominations in Japan, the United States, France and the Netherlands. De Jongh confronts her reader with social dilemmas by exploring themes such as migration, history and human relationships. She combines vivid details of manga with careful line work and the adventurous style of Franco-Belgian comics, switching effortlessly between her different themes.

The StoryLines exhibition presents a wide selection of De Jongh's work, including sketchbooks and original drawings from her graphic novels and digital 2D animations, composed of thousands of hand-drawn frames. Several works on the theme of migration are also on display, such as her journalistic reports in refugee camps that she made on behalf of NRC on Lesbos, Greece. There she met people who fled their homes and countries because of war and terrorism, only to be met with resistance in Europe. De Jongh makes numerous drawings of the environment and the people on site.

A lot of attention is paid to De Jongh's comic strip adaptation of the still current 'Lord of the Flies', written in 1954 by Nobel Prize winner William Golding. 'Lord of the Flies' tells the story of a group of British schoolboys who are stranded on a desert island and engage in a dramatic power struggle for survival. De Jongh's graphic novel will be published in September 2024 and will form an important part of the exhibition, which will also include the original drawings.