Simon Fujiwara: NEW WORK (Goethe-Institut)

Together with AMMODO and Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, the Goethe-Institut Niederlande invites you to ‘Who the Bær’, the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands of the artist Simon Fujiwara.

For this occasion, the doors of the Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam opened already in April 2021 to presents  a large number of Fujiwara’s recent works on paper in which the creation of an original cartoon character (Who the Bær) is central. While in Berlin, during the first lockdown of 2020, Fujiwara started drawing and creating collages with different versions of his bear, developing the concept of a contemporary figure that exists as a “total image in search of a self-image in a world full of images”. Since then, Who the Bær has grown into a large-scale project with expressions in the form of drawings, collages, sculptures, animation, and animatronics, which together have sometimes been described as a “Bildung novel with meme aesthetic”. Using a cartoon character as a simplified lens for considering our visual culture, Fujiwara’s absurdist creations become reflections on the complex mechanisms for defining self-image in an image-dominated world.

In this exhibition the artist returns to the origins of his project and presents a personal archive of more than 100 drawings and ‘thinkings’ showing the different ways in which his Who the Bær is used as a comic avatar to explore joys and traumas, violence and happiness of indirect life in the modern world.

The exhibition will remain open to the public until September 12.

You can find more information on Who the Bær on Goethe-Institut’s website, and you can follow it via the official Instagram account @whothebaer.