Chris Ware, drawing is thinking

Under the title Drawing is Thinking the Barcelona Contemporary Culture Center (CCCB) organizes a retrospective exhibition around the work of the influential American comic artist Chris Ware (Omaha, Nebraska, 1967).

The exhibition, curated by Jordi Costa, traces from his beginnings to the present the work of this artist whose most representative works are Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories, and Rusty Brown.

Drawn to a way of drawing that moves away from cinematic language, Ware's creations have made him a worldwide reference in the creative field of comics and graphic novels.

Joyce, Nabokov, Tolstoy

Due to the influence and reach of his innovative work, his creation has been compared to that of great figures of universal literature such as James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Leo Tolstoy.

"From Tolstoy, Ware draws the strength to make fiction a faithful reflection of life. Nabokov's conviction that words and images intertwine in our minds to form the fabric of memory supports the entire visual poetics of the comic artist," writes Judit Carrera, director of CCCB, in the informational dossier of the exhibition.

And Joyce, she adds, "is his explicit reference when it comes to providing a visual formulation of the subjectivity of the characters and their stream of consciousness."

Ware, the CCCB reports, has been drawing since he was young. He writes with panels in a way that has led him to experiment throughout his life with the language and narrative of comics.

From the private collection of Ware

The exhibition is an expanded adaptation of Building Chris Ware, curated by Benoît Peeters and Julien June Miseerey, with the collaboration of the author, presented at the Angoulême International Comics Festival (France) in 2022.

It has subsequently been possible to see it at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (France), the Basel Cartoon Museum (Switzerland), the Palazzo del Fumetto in Pordenone (Italy), the 37PK Gallery in Haarlem (Netherlands), and the Techne Sphere in Leipzig (Germany).

The CCCB show, which closes the European tour of the exhibition, expands the content with new originals and objects from Chris Ware's private collection.

Visitors will find in the exhibition the Acme Novelty Library, a publication in which Ware, in 1993, created his most popular characters. The latest issues of this magazine were self-published by Ware himself in the form of object books.

Works, newspapers, and paper

Jimmy Corrigan, the smartest boy on earth, the author's first major work, is a story with a strong emotional and autobiographical component and occupies one of the sections of the exhibition.

Important other works such as Rusty Brown and Building Stories also have their own space, which alone would characterize the entire innovative strength of the author's artistic proposal.

The sources of his creative work occupy part of the exhibition in sections such as the one dedicated to Quimby the Mouse, comics influenced by the comic strips published in newspapers in the first half of the 20th century, especially the character Krazy Kat by George Herriman.

This need to work on paper, typical of the early days of comics and newspaper strips, is still preserved by the American cartoonist and illustrator, author of several covers for the magazine The New Yorker, works that can also be seen in this exhibition.

American culture and underground

In some way, Ware's work draws from both the tradition of his own art and other manifestations of 20th-century American culture, such as jazz music, which has inspired several of his works, or Robert Crumb's underground comics.

The publication of Crumb's drawing notebooks encouraged Ware to follow this format and publish his own drawing notebooks, which, according to the organization, show an interesting reverse side of his editorial production.

Exhibition Chris Ware. Drawing is Thinking
Barcelona Contemporary Culture Center.
Montealegre, 5. Barcelona.
Until November 9
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday and holidays from 10:00 to 20:00.
Closed on non-holiday Mondays