Tim Burton

29 May - 31 October 2011

© Tim Burton Untitled (Ramone), 1980–1990 Pen and ink, marker and colored pencil on paper Overall: 11 x 9" Private Collection

TIM BURTON
29 May – 31 October, 2011

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents a major retrospective exploring the full range of Tim Burton's creative work, both as a film director and as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer.

Tim Burton was born in Burbank in 1958. After studying at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), he worked as an animator at the Walt Disney Studios before breaking out on his own. Taking inspiration from popular culture, fairy tales and traditions of the gothic, Burton has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as an expression of a personal vision.

The exhibition brings together over 700 drawings, paintings, photographs, moving-image works, storyboards, puppets, concept artworks, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera, including art from a number of unrealized and little-known personal projects. Many of these objects come from the artist's own archive, as well as from studio archives and private collections of Burton's collaborators. Hundreds of never-before-exhibited artworks and sketches will be joined by a selection of film posters accompanied by music composed for the exhibition by Burton's longtime collaborator Danny Elfman.

Two large-scale outdoor artworks are also installed on campus: a topiary inspired by Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Balloon Boy, an enormous figure based on an amalgamation of characters that Burton first introduced in his 1997 book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories.

www.lacma.org