Anyone who receives mail from Axel Scheffler is sometimes faced with a challenge.

And that's before he can turn to the content.

Because an envelope decorated by the sender in this way will be opened differently than normal letters.

In any case, you won't bury your fingers somewhere between the flap and the cover and tear them open - the danger of damaging the picture on the front is great with this method.

If you are reasonably skilled, you might use a letter opener, but with a bit of bad luck you can cut a folded item that came with the letter, such as a newspaper clipping, in the middle.

What's left?

Carefully loosen the tab at the splice?

But it too can tear easily and damage the sender address.

In the meantime, after some trial and error, I've found a fairly non-destructive way that works at least for covers that aren't painted all the way to the left or right edge: By carefully shaking, the content is moved all the way to the narrow side;

on the other side I cut off an extremely thin strip with the scissors.

The envelope is open, the letter can be read.

But what are these envelopes?

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The two exhibitions in Leipzig and Frankfurt devoted to this special area of ​​Axel Scheffler's artistic work show a great deal of variety: Some covers are completely painted, some with cut-out figures, in a few muted colors or brightly colored.

The scenes change hemispheres and epochs, and individual addressees are given specific groups of motifs: a correspondent receives skeleton after skeleton, often varying the motifs of the respective stamps in this way, another platypus in a multitude of repetitions, who act as messengers of the “Platipost” ( after the English word "Platypus" for the platypus) and sometimes uninhibitedly disregard the "Platipost secret" by happily rummaging through a delivery bag.

The rules of a cultivated correspondence

The platypus is not the only cover motif that reacts to Corona, others - from the agile Easter bunny to a dancing couple to the sunk down squirrel - also cover their faces in fear of Corona.

In December 2020, Santa Claus will also be wearing a mask.

What she leaves uncovered suggests a rather angry being, whose whole body appears tense and whose eyes stand out unusually even for this artist's handwriting, as if the person painted on the envelope could not understand the inability and Helplessness in dealing with the pandemic revealed, and above all: as if he could not approve of it.

Because just as the envelopes are tailored to the addressee, to the picture,

what the artist makes of his correspondent and his preferences and interests, they also react to the world in which the correspondence takes place.

And comment on the time of the Brexit decision and the following months with images of sadness and anger.