Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets

By Ron Magliozzi, Edwin Carels, and the Quay Brothers

The Quay Brothers are internationally renowned moving-image artists and designers who, for over thirty years, have been at the vanguard of stop-motion puppet animation and live-action movie making, working in the Eastern European tradition of filmmakers such as Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Å vankmajer, and Yuri Norstein and championing a design aesthetic influenced by the graphic surrealism of Polish poster artists of the 1950s and 1960s. They have produced more than forty-five moving-image works since 1971, including feature films, music videos, dance films, documentaries, and signature personal works that fall outside these genres, and designed sets and projections for opera, theater, and concert performances. This richly illustrated publication, published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, presents the Quay Brothers' full oeuvre, comprising previously unseen moving-image works and a little-known body of works on paper, including graphic design, drawings, typography, and notebooks for films.