Uncanny Valleys, Blexbolex, Richard McGuire, Olivier Schrauwen
November 9 - December 2, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 11, 6-8pmIn cooperation with the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival,
SOLOWAY's newest exhibition UNCANNY VALLEYS brings together three
internationally renowned comics artists: Blexbolex, Richard McGuire,
and Olivier Schrauwen.Through dozens of rarely seen prints and works on paper, UNCANNY VALLEYS considers the ways that these three artists blur disciplines of drawing, design, and printmaking to construct their unique approaches to approximating the tangled and fraught psychology of the human subject. From Blexbolex's brutally and beautifully reductive depictions of human archetypes, through McGuire's generative fusing of Popeye and Olive Oyl into a seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary of abstract configurations, to Schrauwen's absurd and disturbing physiognomic images, each of these artists utilizes the graphic tradition of representation to achieve surprising, unnerving, playful, funny--and often, uncanny-- results.
Curated by Bill Kartalopolous of the Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Festival.
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Artist, printer and writer Blexbolex was born Bernard Granger on May 26, 1966 in northern France and grew up in the Auvergne region. He studied silkscreen printing at the School of Fine Arts in Angoulême from 1984 to 1991. In 1992, he began printing professionally, making his own underground publications on the side. From 1996 to 2005, he printed silkscreens and designed books for the leading independent comics publisher Cornélius, in Paris. After a decade of cult notoriety, Blexbolex has received considerable acclaim for his children's books, including Seasons and People, as well as his surrealist takes on genre stories, Abecederia and Dog Crime. Blexbolex
currently lives and works in Leipzig, Germany.Richard McGuire has produced an enormously diverse body of work, first as the founder and bassist of the seminal No Wave band Liquid Liquid, and since then as a multidisciplinary visual artist and designer. His groundbreaking and deeply influential short story "Here" (1989) helped reconfigure the way that comics depict time and space. He has contributed many covers and interior illustrations to The New Yorker
and other venues. He has authored children's books, designed toys, products, and interactive media, and has directed stunning animated shorts. Throughout, McGuire's brilliant, witty work reorganizes perception to suggest larger connections between time, people, and places.Olivier Schrauwen was born in Belgium in 1977 and studied animation at the Academy of Art in Gent, and comics at the Saint Luc in Brussels. He is currently based in Berlin. Known for his rigorous formal experimentation and lush visual aesthetic, Schrauwen has developed an international following. Schrauwen is the author of The Man Who Grew His Beard and his own series of pamphlets about his grandfather,
Arséne Schrauwen..
