Thomas Ott (*10.6.1966, Zurich) is the best-known Swiss-German comic author internationally. His mezzotint works combine a black-heavy, film-oriented visual language with dark, nightmarish stories to create an unmistakable mixture. The masterful strokes and opulent plasticity of the images scratched with the cutter form an oppressive contrast to the reduced wordlessness of his stories.
Thomas Ott's first works appeared in the comic magazine "Strapazin" while he was still studying graphic design at the Zurich School of Design. After graduating, he worked as a freelance comic artist and illustrator. In 1989, the publisher Edition Moderne publishes his book "Tales of Error", scratched in mezzotint. It is the first in a series of acclaimed comic albums in which he combines the drastically exaggerated depiction of pulp films and books with grotesque, cryptic tragedies.
In addition to numerous comic albums, he also produced cinematic works such as the animated film "Robert Creep", which was created in collaboration with Claude Luyet and won the Audience Award at the Solothurn Film Festival in 1993. After eight years in Paris, Thomas Ott began a second degree in film at the Zurich Academy of Art and Design, which he completed in 2002 and which was followed by further short and animated films. His most recent works are the diary of a journey along the Route 66 in the USA for the renowned "Louis Vuitton Travel Book Series" and the sensitive and surreal short story "La Forêt" in the "25 Images" collection published by Éditions Martin de Halleux.
The Cartoonmuseum Basel is showing the first museum retrospective of the artist, who has received multiple grants from the Swiss Federal Scholarship for Applied Arts and was the first comic artist to be awarded the Swiss Grand Prix Design in 2017. The comprehensive exhibition presents originals from all his comic albums, stagings of groups of works, animated and live-action films as well as objects and sources of inspiration.