Chris Ware Exhibition

Adam Baumgold Gallery (60 E 66th St.)

[Image: Double-sided Monograph exhibition poster 27 x 31 in.]

This event has ended.

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents an exhibition of original drawings by Chris Ware to coincide with the release of his new book Monograph (Rizzoli). The book, and these works, form a sort of mini-retrospective spanning never before exhibited early works to more recent experiments and pages, the exhibition balancing the relationship between two and three dimensional approaches with a display of his now out-of-print mass-produced objects, as well.

Bringing together drawings from a broad cross section of his career, in the words of Françoise Mouly, “[Ware’s] beat is daily life: how we relate or fail to relate to each other, how we inhabit our homes and apartments” Ware’s pages become maps, diagrams, x-rays, advertisements, music and blueprints for abbreviations of emotional memory. His crisp templates, insets, borders, and dotted lines mimic mnemonic processes, allowing his stories to move “forward and backward in time, span generations, careen from the most private internal feelings to wide shots of the city or the vast expanse of a World’s Fair.”

Chris Ware is the author of Jimmy Corrigan – the Smartest Kid on Earth, which received the Guardian First Book Award and was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial of American Art — as well as chosen by The London Times in 2010 as one of the best 100 books of the decade and deemed one of Amazon’s “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime” in 2014. His fourteen-books-in-a-box experiment Building Stories was voted a 2012 Top Ten Fiction Book of the Year by The New York Times, Time Magazine and Publishers Weekly. A regular contributor to The New Yorker Magazine since 1999, he guest-edited the 13th issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and was the first cartoonist chosen to regularly serialize an ongoing story in The New York Times Magazine and, more recently, in the pages of the Guardian. His work has appeared in solo exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Gävle Konstcentrum in Sweden and was the focus of the PBS program Art in the 21st Century in late 2016. Moreover, Chris Ware is widely acknowledged as the most gifted and beloved cartoonist of his generation by both his wife and his twelve-year-old daughter.