The Design Museum showed the work of Tim Burton, from childhood drawings to set and costume design, in the last stop of a decade-long world tour and its only showing in the UK.
The Design Museum in Kensington gave its galleries to Tim Burton, the director of Batman and Edward Scissorhands, from Friday 25 October 2024 to Monday 26 May 2025. It was the exhibition’s only showing in the UK.
Burton was born in Burbank, California, in 1958. He made his feature debut with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985, and Beetlejuice reached a wide audience in 1988.
He produced The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993, from a poem he had written himself. In 1997 he published a book of illustrated stories, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy. His films have kept one style, at once comic, grotesque and tender towards the misfit.
The exhibition followed that style beyond cinema. Drawn from his personal archive, it covered his work from childhood to the present as an illustrator, painter, photographer and author.
The galleries held drawings, paintings, sketchbooks, moving-image works and sculptural installations, with his set and costume design. The museum built its account around his collaborations with designers and the motifs that recur in his characters.
London was the final stop of a world tour that had run for a decade.