Les drôles de petites bêtes, by Antoon Krings

• Exhibition from May 24 to July 13, 2024
• Tuesday to Saturday, 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.
• Entry without reservation

Galerie Gallimard is pleased to celebrate 30 years of creation of "Les Drôles de Petites Bêtes" by Antoon Krings, the emblematic collection published by Giboulées, at Gallimard Jeunesse.

On this occasion, 75 paintings, 32 preparatory drawings and several objects that have fueled the artist's imagination are exhibited, until July 13, 2024.

The world of the Drôles de Petites Bêtes, unique in children's literature, has been enchanting children, young and old, for thirty years. Over the course of 73 albums, the artist and author Antoon Krings has brought to life an extraordinary garden and bestiary. More than 70 little creatures joyfully lead their tiny lives in a fabulous garden, each one more comical, funny, and poetic than the last. Each with its own tastes, colors, quirks, whims, and mischief...

Antoon Krings likes to remember his childhood games in the garden of the family home in the north of France, where each bark, each flower petal, each blade of grass appeared as a playful invitation to excite each of his senses. The artist is above all a city dweller who carefully cultivates his imaginary garden.

© Antoine Doyen / Mirage Collective

"When I was a child, I could spend hours following the little creatures' antics, observing their ways of communicating with each other or going from one point to another. For me, drawing is rediscovering this marvelous garden, these tiny lives: a world of another dimension like children invent for themselves."

For thirty years, Antoon Krings has been talented in staging his "little beasts" with sometimes beautifully old-fashioned names and epic and poetic adventures. A theatre of nature that blossomed in the mid-1990s when, at the invitation of the publisher Colline Faure-Poirée, he joined Gallimard Jeunesse Giboulées. It was with the characters of Mireille the bee, Léon the bumblebee and Siméon the butterfly that he initiated the beautiful adventure of the "Drôles de Petites Bêtes".

"I had conceptualized the idea of ​​insect characters, but without knowing if the adventure would last over time. I didn't know, for example, that I would systematically use a rhyme in the title." Mireille the bee, the first little creature, will therefore be joined by 72 others to date, from Léon the bumblebee to Elia the chipmunk..."

Translated into around twenty languages, the collection (73 albums to date) was cited in 2009 in the reference work on children's literature: 1001 Children's Books You Must Read before You Grow up , and often awarded. But it is the Michel Tournier Jeunesse 2016 prize, whose jury is composed of children, which impresses Antoon Krings the most.

Signing with Antoon Krings on Saturday June 15, 2024 at the Galerie Gallimard, from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.