Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image Making

“Animation and cartoons are part of our global contemporary culture,” Arturo Herrera says in an interview from the book Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image Making. “Their simplified forms and friendly colors are precise and carefully orchestrated to make an immediate impact.”

The “immediate impact” of the comic form is something with which all of the artists in Comic Abstraction deal. Rather than being weighed down by the familiarity or by the accessibility of the comic format, they use these aspects of the form to grab at the audience’s subconscious.

The results are both disorienting and satisfying. Arturo Herrera’s abstracted drawings of Disney’s seven dwarves put the characters’ hands, feet, and other body parts in such contorted positions that you’ll wonder how Bashful got his name.

The work of Sue Williams has a similar effect, though she doesn’t draw from the Disney pool. Inka Essenhigh’s paintings, constructed of clean lines and flat planes of color, hold an eerie tension that separates them from traditional comic book art. Phillipe Parreno’s speech-bubble-shaped balloons, displayed in an otherwise empty room, bring that familiar comic-book icon (the bubble) into reality—blank and floating above the viewer’s head.

Along with Herrera, Essenhigh, Williams, and Parreno, the book features Polly Apfelbaum, Ellen Gallagher, Michel Majerus, Julie Mehretu, Juan Muñoz, Takashi Murakami, Rivane Nuenschwander, Gary Simmons, and Franz West. There are full-color reproductions of the artists’ work in the book, along with interviews by art critic Roxana Marcoci. If you’ve ever read a comic book or watched a cartoon, this book is worth checking out.

– Halle Jane Butler

Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image Making
Authors: Glen Lowry and Roxana Marcoci