Niklaus Ruegg: Pirate Gold

With his new album “Pirate Gold” Niklaus Rüegg follows up on the legendary and now long out-of-print comic volume “SPUK”. The four picture stories collected here refer to the well-known Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comics as well. While in “SPUK” the existing stories were depopulated by redrawing the sceneiries, “Pirate Gold” features an overlay of several original comic pages where the narrative elements were removed with a cutter. What remains are empty sceneries and colorful backgrounds, at the same time everyday and surreal settings that invite the viewer to mentally play them with events. The individual sections overlap so that the holes reveal the next pages, the continuation of the plotless story – and finally the black sheets that were placed between the stories during scanning. The missing protagonists are replaced, as it were, by these black shapes in the center of the image fields. While the black-filled empty spaces expand on the right-hand pages of the book as they are turned, on the left-hand pages they are increasingly displaced from the edges by the fragments of the scenery. This creates new spaces between the pages, giving the work a sculptural character.

Niklaus Ruegg Website
www.nikla.us

Pages: 60
Dimensions: 255 × 340 mm
Format: Hardcover
Year: 2022
Design: Georg Rutishauser
Publisher: edition fink