Comic-Residenz 2017: Sophia Martineck

Brussels and comics have been a love story for a long time. In addition to the famous Comic Museum, you will come across colourful frescoes and comic strips again and again in the cityscape, on the walls of houses, street corners and in subways. The "comic-mania" has long since reached other countries as well, and comics and graphic novels are now regarded as an indispensable means of expression through which a critical, sometimes sharp-tongued-ironic, sometimes painfully crude view of our current events is cast. To promote this versatile art form and the artists behind it, the Goethe-Institut Brussels is organising a comic residency for the first time this year.
 

For this residency, German comic artist Sophia Martineck moved her workplace from Berlin to the Belgian capital at the beginning of November. For four weeks, she had the opportunity to deepen ongoing projects and tackle new ones in a workspace at Passa Porta in the city centre - with Brussels' diverse comic tradition as a source of inspiration. On 9 November 2017, she gave a workshop on graphic storytelling for students at the Sint-Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp. From 24 to 26 November 2017, she also participated with an exhibition at the Grafixx festival in Antwerp, which offers a platform to cartoonists from all over the world.

The Comic Residency 2017 is an initiative of the Goethe-Institut Brussels, in collaboration with Passa Porta (Brussels) and DE Studio (Antwerp).

Sophia Martineck lives in Berlin, where she works as an illustrator and comic artist. During her studies in Visual Communication at the University of the Arts, she spent semesters abroad in New York and Liverpool. She then began drawing for American and English newspapers such as the New York Times and the Guardian. In 2010, the Art Directors Club in New York awarded her the Young Guns Award. In Germany, she received the Hans Meid Award for Book Illustration in 2009. In 2012, her first book "Hühner, Porno, Schlägerei" was published by Avant-Verlag. She has designed pictures and animations for two theatre productions in Berlin. She also plays the chord zither in the Berlin band Mazookas and shows illustrations for some songs.

Books:

Links 

www.martineck.com
www.grafixx.be
www.passaporta.be