Collection Lambert, Avignon, France
2021
Imagined as part of the program of BD 2020—deemed the “Year of the Comic Strip” in France—the exhibition Comics Trip! is envisaged as an incisive journey into the heart of radical drawing practices within contemporary art. It investigates the links that artists have forged with comic strip aesthetics and narrative drawing over the past sixty years and sheds light on the work of certain alternative comic strip artists working in the underground or whose practice deliberately departs from the expectations of a restrictive mass culture industry. Bringing together the drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos, music, and documents of over thirty artists from the 1960s to today, Comics Trip! presents several generations of artists engaged in deconstructing our relationship with the canons of good taste and beauty, in breaking down borders between high art and popular culture, and whose work is imbued by the subcultures with whom they share time and space and that they feed into. Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, Rob Syers, Shyppy Mark, Vaughn Bode, and Charles Burns push back the limits of what they saw as official taste and academicism, from a profoundly underground comic strip world that they have invented, converging with issues that others are investigating from within institutions of contemporary art.