Comics--often called The Boondocks, the Sunday-paper funnies, anime, manga or, formally, sequential art--no longer merit a simple smirk or chuckle to escape reality, but is aggressively addressed it at MoMA’s Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making exhibit. Employing the works of thirteen contemporary artists, the exhibit examines the way artists use their works as platforms to address social ills and problems while skillfully balancing abstraction with humor. Artists like Julie Mehretu and her chromatically-defiant canvas-scapes and Ellen Gallagher’s repetition and inversion use their work to strip down the complex issues that surround and interest them.
What we at Code Z find particularly unique are the varying methods and processes used by the featured artists to articulate their work. “I work with source material that I am interested in conceptually, politically, or even just visually," explained Mehretu in a MoMA interview. "I pull from all of this material, project it, trace it, break it up, recontextualize, layer one on the other, and envelop it into the DNA of the painting. It then becomes the context, the history, the point of departure. It becomes the place of the painting.” Gallagher’s Oh! Susanna also uses the allure of abstract art to challenge the ideal of race as a fixed identity through the use black caricatures and an old slave song.
Comic Abstraction affirms the notion that artists play an integral role in serving as society’s mirror that lends visual and conceptual commentary to the current social climate.
Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image-Making is at MoMA in New York until June 11. If you miss Mehretu and Gallagher at MoMA, be sure to check for them here and here.
