Mondi Accanto or Adjacent Worlds is the first major Italian solo exhibition in homage to Nicole Claveloux, a fundamental and absolutely atypical figure on the international comics and illustration scene.

One of the first and few women to make her mark in French comics in the 1970s, feminist and irreverent, driven by an unbridled passion for drawing and a biting, ironic spirit with which she views the world, Claveloux has moved throughout her career between comics and children's literature, transcending and contaminating genres, language barriers, and the taboos of the society she has always mockingly criticized.
Thanks to an unparalleled graphic and kaleidoscopic energy, Claveloux has always distinguished herself as a constructor, and, at the same time, destroyer, of worlds: her universes are crazy, multiple, ridiculous, running parallel, all while existing alongside or even within our reality.

While she has gone surprisingly undiscovered in our country up to this point, her rediscovery today spotlights her role as a forerunner of many of the complex issues and demands of our contemporary world. Her work remains extremely topical. It is at the same time an invitation to imagine worlds alongside one another, free from constraints and dogma, where the fantastic becomes an alternative to the present; a feminist vision of society that allows women, girls, artichokes, hermit crabs, and seventeenth-century queens to coexist fluidly; and an irrepressible freedom of expression.

The exhibition retraces the long career of Claveloux, who began publishing in the 1970s, and who, never one to relent, is drawing a new comic this year at the age of 86.

More than two hundred works —without distinction between comics and illustration, between
works for adults and children's literature— highlight the common threads that are interwoven
throughout her artistic works: the relationship with the fantastic; laughter as a filter for viewing
the world and the imagination; a meeting ground of comedy, caricature, and parody; a look at
childhood and the relationship with its deepest, truest, and wildest side; the fairy tale as an
inexhaustible matrix to be transformed and tampered with; and, last but not least, feminism and
the reclamation of female desire as the engine of stories.

The exhibition will take place in the ex Chiesa di San Mattia, whose eccentric female convent
history seems to perfectly match the singularity of an artist like Claveloux.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Eris Edizioni is publishing La mano verde e altri racconti the artist's first comic book translated into Italian, some of whose original illustrations are on display.


MORE EVENTS

From November 10th to January 10th, Salaborsa Library will host Quando gli adulti sono di spalle. L’infanzia secondo Nicole Claveloux/When Adults Are Turned Away: Childhood According to Nicole Claveloux, an exhibition of prints from the artist's revolutionary illustrated books in which she recounts childhood through a lens of freedom and pure play.

On Thursday, November 20th, the program will also includes two events: one on her role in the
international comics scene, with experts such as Loïc Boyer, Jean-Marc Lonjon, Laura Scarpa,
and Ilaria Tontardini (Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna/ Academy of Fine Arts, 10 a.m.); and,
secondly, a reflection on the contemporaneity of her stories with David B., Laura Pugno, and
Emilio Varrà (Salaborsa Library, 5 p.m.).

Discover the special project dedicated to Nicole Claveloux here.