The Other Side tells of a dream kingdom which becomes a nightmare, of a journey to Pearl, a mysterious city created deep in Asia, which is also a journey to the depths of the subconcious, or as Kubin himself called it, 'a sort of Baedeker for those lands which are half known to us'.
Written in 1908, and more or less half way between Meyrink and Kafka, it was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the artists and writers of the Expressionist generation.

' Expressionist illustrator Kubin wrote this fascinating curio, his only literary work in 1908. A town named Pearl, assembled and presided over by the aptly named Patera, is the setting for his hallucinatory vision of a society founded on instinct over reason. Culminating apocalyptically - plagues of insects, mountains of corpses and orgies in the street - it is worth reading for its dizzying surrealism alone. Though ostensibly a gothic macabre fantasy, it is tempting to read The Other Side as a satire on the reactionary, idealist utopianism evident in German thought in the early twentieth century, highly prescient in its gloom, given later developments. The language often suggests Nietsche. The inevitable collapse of Patera's creation is lent added horror by hindsight. Kubin's depiction of absurd bureaucracy is strongly reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial, and his flawed utopia, situated next to a settlement of supposed savages, brings to mind Huxley's Brave New World; it precedes both novels, and this superb new translation could demonstrate its influence on subsequent modern literature.'
Kieron Pim in Time Out

It will appeal to fans of Mervyn Peake and readers who like the darkly decadent, the fantastic and the grotesque in their reading.

Kubin's eerie, unsettling illustrations reveal his preoccupation with the world's evils

For Austrian artist Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), evil was intrinsic to his life and work. After a traumatic childhood growing up in Zell am See and subsequent mental crises, he began his artistic training in Munich in 1898. He processed his nightmares and obsessions in a large number of fantastical drawings. His subjects, perpetually pessimistic, remain relevant a century later: war, famine, pestilence, death and every horror in between. Kubin had a pronounced fear of the feminine, sexuality, night time and of being at the mercy of fate, all of which visited him in uncanny dreams. For Kubin, the aesthetic of evil proved to be the antithesis of the idyll: the deliberate suppression of a hideous reality.
Drawn from the Albertina Museum's collection of over 1,800 drawings by the artist, The Aesthetic of Evil displays Kubin's grotesque vision as well as his superb draftsmanship. Amid the violent, haunting atmosphere of his graphic works it is easy to see how Kubin became trapped in his dark visions, to the point where the inexhaustible, intangible specter of evil consumed his life. Essays by Elisabeth Dutz, Natalie Lettner and Brigitte Holzinger explore Kubin's cosmos of the sinister: his personal iconography of evil fueled by his nightmares and obsessions.

Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin (1877-1959) was an Austrian printmaker, illustrator, and occasional writer. Kubin is considered an important representative of Symbolism and Expressionism and is noted for dark, spectral, symbolic fantasies, often assembled into thematic series of drawings.

Originally published in 1950 this work covers his viewpoint on art, the method of his work, and his creative process, with over 100 black and white illustrations from his career as an illustrator.

The artist's memoirs recount his troubled youth, which was shadowed by his hatred for his estranged father, his attempted suicide at the grave of his beloved mother, and his mental breakdown during military service. Upon his 1899 enrollment at the Munich Academy, Kubin discovered a world of inspiration in the works of Odilon Redon, Edvard Munch, James Ensor, and Max Klinger, and he vowed to dedicate his life to the creation of similarly imaginative art.

The pen-and-ink drawings featured in this compilation include grotesques from his Dance of Death sequence, which employs a Renaissance theme to reflect the artist's interpretation of modern society and its rapid changes, as well as illustrations from various works of Edgar Allen Poe.

Alfred Kubin is renowned as one of the all-time finest illustrators of fantastic themes, Kubin illustrated more than 70 books, including the works of Dostoyevsky and Poe as well as his own fiction.

The first overview in a decade on Kubin's gothic pageant of dreamworld menace

The art of the great Austrian draftsman, illustrator and author Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) appears more current today than ever before; wartime destruction, pandemics, natural disasters and the manipulation of the masses pervade his highly narrative works. Kubin's nightmarish oeuvre extends Symbolism and the fantastical art of the 19th century and may be considered a precursor to French Surrealism, with its syntheses of actual and imaginary reality, its bleak realms that Kubin often seasoned with humor, irony and exaggeration.
Published for an exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Alfred Kubin: Confessions of a Tortured Soul offers an exploration of Kubin's oneiric worlds in terms of their relation to the unconscious. Through this lens, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist August Ruhs addresses pieces by Kubin selected by curator Hans-Peter Wipplinger. In addition, Kubin's works are placed into a dialogue with works by artists of the 19th century and of the classical modernism from which Kubin derived inspiration.

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