Georges Schwizgebel
Biography
Georges Schwizgebel was born in 1944 in Switzerland. He studied arts and graphic design at the School of Fine and Decorative Arts in Geneva. In 1971, after four years working for an advertising agency, he joined forces with Claude Luyet and Daniel Suter and set up the studio GDS to produce and direct animation films, among other things. Animation cinema attracted Georges Schwizgebel immediately and since there was no school for this he taught himself. In 1974, his film The Flight of Icarus, an original symbiosis between light bulb animation and harpsichord pieces of musician Frangois Couperin, focused the attention of specialists on Georges Schwizgebel´s work. Since then, as a true painter, he has steadily juggled with acrylic, oil and gouache painting on cels and found inspiration in varied musical styles, e.g. accordion waltz 78 Tours (1985), opera extracts The Ride to the Abyss (1992). Georges Schwizgebel first presented his film Fugue in Annecy in 1999 and since then, this as well as other works like The Subject of the Picture, 78 tours, The Year of the Deer etc. has been shown at numerous festivals and obtained many prizes.
Illustration Features
Georges Schwizgebel represents a type of a remarkably comprehensive artist. In turn a stage designer, a fresco painter, a building signposter, he has never stopped exhibiting his work at numerous venues and regularly directing or co-directing frequently awarded animation films. He paints directly on cello, exploiting the transparency of acrylic gouache for rendering. He redesigns all the backgrounds as the narrative demands, from cutting out to taking the shots, changing the view points and perspectives ad infinitum, with a dexterity one would only think possible from a computer. These figures are born at the tip of the paintbrush, mainly through the grace of music, an essential part of his work. In every piece, image and music are intertwined, leading each other. Schwizgebel´s films - musical animated paintings – are unanimously recognised on the international scene for their virtuosity. His savoir–faire leads the spectator in an unimaginable choreography, proposing a view of things only seen in animation cinema.