Peter de Sève: City Dwellers

Philippe Labaune Gallery is pleased to present City Dwellers, a new exhibition of work by New York-born, Brooklyn-based artist Peter de Sève. Bringing together original covers and preparatory drawings for The New Yorker, picturesque scenes and landscapes of his native city where he still lives and works, character designs from three decades of feature animation, and the private sketchbook drawings in which his most personal work now takes shape. The exhibition surveys the full breadth of his practice, which is instantly recognizable, but when seen in the original, is entirely new.

De Sève's affection for creatures of every kind finds its roots in a childhood on the suburban edges of Long Island, spent searching nearby ponds for turtles, frogs, and snakes and haunting the local pet shop until the owner finally hired him. Alongside the animals came the monsters of Friday-night horror films. When his great-grandfather, an antiquarian bookseller in London, died, volumes illustrated by Arthur Rackham and A. B. Frost passed to the family. In those artists, de Sève found the tightrope he has walked ever since: the narrow line between cartooning and realism.

In 2023, de Sève's first exhibition at our Gallery, Local Fauna, presented a sweeping retrospective of his career alongside the monograph of the same name, which brought together essays by Mike Mignola, Glen Keane, and Françoise Mouly with an extended conversation with Bill Watterson. Looking back across four decades of work, de Sève identified a shift that has only deepened since. As he has allowed himself more time for work that is not commissioned, he has found himself leaning steadily toward the fantastic and further away from reality, a movement that shapes much of what is gathered here.

New York has long been his most generous subject. De Sève did not set out to become a New Yorker artist; the invitation from art editor Françoise Mouly arrived after years of steady, incremental work, and he has since contributed forty-eight covers to the magazine. Many of them find their stage in the city itself: its subway platforms, boardwalks, parks, and crowded streets, observed with affection and a gently wicked wit. Each is built as a single, uncaptioned image in which the viewer takes in what seems a complete picture before the joke arrives on the second look. For de Sève, a drawing that cannot carry its idea in silence has not done its job.

In animation, de Sève has shaped some of contemporary film's most memorable characters. As lead character designer for the Ice Age franchise, he created Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel whose doomed pursuit of a single acorn became a worldwide comedic phenomenon, and his designs have informed films from Finding Nemo to The Little Prince. His process begins in open exploration, offering directors both what they asked for and what they never thought to ask for, before narrowing toward the finest nuances of an expression. His work has earned a Daytime Emmy Award and, in 2016, induction into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

The sketchbook drawings show the artist at his most unguarded. Worked in wax crayon on a nearly indestructible plastic vellum capable of both deep blacks and the softest grays, they carry the apparent spontaneity de Sève admired as a teenager in the drawings of Heinrich Kley, and the patient labor he later discovered beneath it.

What unifies these bodies of work is not medium, client, or genre, but the hand itself. A collector of original drawings himself, de Sève remains a devoted advocate for the original at a time when much illustration reaches the wall only as a print. What he values most in an original is how human it is: the light pencil beneath the finished line, revealing an artist still trying to find their way. City Dwellers extends that same invitation to its visitors. As his longtime friend and fellow illustrator Carter Goodrich has written, "when you look at his artwork, you're looking directly at and into Peter de Sève himself."