Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys

 
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys have been working together as an artist duo since the end of the 1980s. Their photographs, drawings, objects, and videos—steeped in black humor, critical (self)-reflection and overlapping reality, fiction and suppressed history—play with notions of the superficial and banal.
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys's art casts a merciless perspective on reality. Through their numerous artistic approaches, the artist duo visualize their imaginings of the parallel world inherent within the modern human psyche, along with how it manifests itself in the everyday aspects of life and civic conformity. Everything from work, leisure, and family, to social class, masculinity, and marginalization are envisaged through convening an unlikely cast of nonprofessional actors, family members, friends, beards, objects, and mannequins alike, often in banal, homespun settings rife with awkward power dynamics.
 
 Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys - I Piccoli Pupazzi Sporchi di Pruppà
2017
English edition
Mousse - Mousse Publishing (books)
Following the artists' previous series of life-size puppets in Die Schmutzigen Puppen von Pommern, this new publication presents a collection of one hundred sixty-four small puppets, each having a unique look.
 Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys - Die schmutzigen Puppen von Pommern
2016
English edition
Sternberg Press - Monographs and artists' books
(last copies available!)
Part document, part photographic album, this artists' book by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys captures the sculptural revisionings of the descendants of an executioner family from Greifswald in the historical province of Pomerania.
 Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys - Fine Arts
2016
English edition
Sternberg Press - Monographs and artists' books
Following on from the duo's continual playful and dystopic depiction of the human condition, Fine Arts brings together the collection of over ninety watercolors inspired by images found on the Internet.
 Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys - Das Wunder des Lebens
2015
bilingual edition (English / German)
Sternberg Press - Monographs and artists' books
Drawings.
 Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys - Optimundus - M HKA 08 02 13 - 19 05 13
2013
English edition
Sternberg Press - Monographs and artists' books
The catalogue of Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys's major exhibition at M HKA of the same title.
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