Here's the news release that the MK Gallery have sent out about the Pushwagner exhibition that they are hosting during which the MKomix Comic Fair is taking place on July 19th.
This
summer, MK Gallery presents Pushwagner: Soft City (28 June – 2
September 2012), the first solo exhibition outside Norway by the visionary artist
Hariton Pushwagner (born Oslo, 1940). Since the recent discovery of his work, Pushwagner
has become a celebrity in his home nation, appearing regularly in newspaper
headlines and television talk shows,
renowned for his homelessness and hedonistic lifestyle, and compared to a
modern day Edvard Munch.
Pushwagner’s
defining creation is the graphic novel ‘Soft City’, an epic satire of
capitalism and life in the modern metropolis, produced intermittently in Oslo and
London between 1969 and 1976. His work also takes the form of
intricate and obsessively detailed paintings, presenting a personal mythology
of a world under perpetual siege from pollution, totalitarianism and mass
destruction.
At MK Gallery a
tightly focussed
presentation of Pushwagner’s early work will be shown in three distinct
groupings; Soft City, Family of Man and
Apocalypse Frieze. In addition, Pushwagner’s design for an enormous
Pop Art inspired mouth will be realised in the form of a mural surrounding MK
Gallery’s main entrance. Visitors will
have to step onto its projecting tongue and enter the cavernous mouth to reach
the exhibition beyond.
The
154-page graphic novel Soft City provides
an account of mechanical, daily life in a dehumanized, dystopian modern city.
Completed in 1976, the humdrum lives of Pushwagner’s characters allude to
George Gurdjieff’s descriptions of people in a state of ‘waking sleep’. The menacing controller in charge of life in Soft City and the pills the family
swallows on a daily basis evoke Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (1932).
The
Family of Man section focuses on
Pushwagner’s series of thirty-four silkscreen prints produced in the 1980s;
these enlarged variations on Soft City,
printed with a gaudy pink colouring, will be exhibited alongside the Oblidor
Guide Book, a sketchbook
that reveals the artist’s working process. While charting the transition of his
work from the book format to the wall, the obsessive repetition and endless
reworking of almost identical images reveal Pushwagner’s interest in mass
production, mass distribution and making his work available to broad audiences.
The
Apocalypse Frieze, rife with literary
allusion and piercing social commentary, comprises
seven large-scale works of meticulous detail: Heptashinok, 1986; Dadadata,
1987; Gigaton, 1988; Jobkill, 1990; Oblidor, 1991; Klaxton,
1991 and Self- Portait 1993. It shows endless processions of haggard figures,
doggedly advancing towards Armageddon, where factories double up as death camps
and the ravages of war are perpetuated under the watchful eye of robotic men in
suits. These works (shown for the first time as the artist intended) will be
grouped in the style of Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent
Altarpiece of 1432. Self-Portrait
suggests that the artist’s mind is spiralling out of control, as the watchful
eyes of thousands of female nudes witness faceless automata marching down the
vortex to oblivion. The Apocalypse
Frieze will be presented alongside early sketches made in homage to
artistic figures from Hieronymous Bosch to Vincent Van Gogh.
Following
its presentation in Milton Keynes, the exhibition will tour to Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Norway, and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in the
Netherlands.
MK
Gallery’s Pushwagner exhibition coincides with the exhibition Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye at Tate
Modern (28 June – 14 October). The Pushwagner exhibition will be complemented at
MK Gallery by a substantial Norwegian Season of video, music and performance
events with around fifty Norwegian artists and curators.
You can contact me regarding the MKomix Comic Fair here.