Michael Sowa and his pigs.

Pork Soup by Michael Sowa 

One of my favourite imaginary, kind of surreal films is  Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s  Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. Widely knows as  Amélie. Above Amélie bed in her bedroom are hanging pictures/ prints of Michael Sowa. One of the pictures is "Fowl with Pearls" and another is 'Filmhoud".  Michael Sowa is a German surrealist illustrator and painters. He belongs to the most noted  illustrators in Germany. A wider public got aware of him through his illustrations for Axel Hacke’s publications. He used a pseudonym Heinz Obein.

In 1995 Michael Sowa was awarded with the Olaf-Gulbransson-Preis, in 2004 he received the Berlin Bookprice in the category Children’s Books for ‘Prinz Tamino’. Besides many book projects he works for newspapers such as Die Zeit and The New Yorker.

His work has been exhibited in the Wilhelm-Busch-Museum Hannover, in the Kunsthalle Oldenburg, at The Liebenweintrum in Burghausen and repetedly in Japan. In 2009 his 130 works were show in Japan, in Tokyo,   Kyoto and Yokohama.

His works/ imagination has something similar with René  Magritte's work. There is one fundamental difference between them, Sowa is a better painter (qua technique) than Magritte.  Magritte was more illustrator than painter. His paintings are really badly made from the point of view of an perfectionist- painter par excellent like me.

I have been trying to find some more personal/ biographical information about Michael Sowa but couldn't really find a lot about him. He was born in 1945 in Berlin, finished Art Pedagogic College. His name is a Polish one. Sowa means Owl in Polish.

There is a book available on Amazon entitled Sowa's Ark, with a collection of  over fifty farm animal-centric images.

A miniature pig splashes around in a bowl of soup; a duck leads a wheelbarrow down a lane; a woman gently strokes her daughter's face with a live rabbit in a dimly lit room. This work provides a journey into the imagination of artist Michael Sowa where a menagerie of bizarre animals take on complex personae. Using rich textures and inventive techniques of paint and varnish, these pictures achieve the otherworldly look of a surrealist fairy tale. -  From Amazon description 

His work is full of eccentric, humours, bizarre, fabulous stories most of them about animals. I love paintings which tell stories. His technique is 'magnifique'.

Here is the cover of his book from Amazon.



 I just order Sowa's Ark. Soon I will post more about him.

Below are some images of his paintings, which I really like.

School of Fish 

The Bear by Michael Sowa

Flying Pig by Michael Sowa