KABOOM!

Comic strips and cartoons have been a constant source of inspiration for artists from the very beginning. But it was not until British and American Pop Art that the world of speech bubbles entered the galleries and museums on a grand scale. Roy Lichtenstein, Öyvind Fahlström and many others adopted the comic’s aesthetic in their painting. In doing so, they provocatively undermined the separation between popular culture and established art. The Weserburg is taking up this theme with a large-scale exhibition. Works by more than 30 international artists are on display. They impressively demonstrate the influence of comics on contemporary art from the 1950s until today.

In particular, works by a younger generation of artists will be presented. They demonstrate the topicality and innovative power that still emanates from the exploration of comics today. The artists use the visual worlds and formal characteristics of comics in exciting and unusual ways. They work across genres with painting, collage, video, drawing, and create sculptures and room-filling installations. In doing so, they only supposedly depict a naive and cheerful surface. Rather, they critically question aesthetic and social phenomena. This is not infrequently done with wit, humor, and biting irony.

American Joyce Pensato brings out another, darker side of comics in her stark black-and-white paintings, which confront us with the grotesque and the ugly. Martin Arnold uses sequences from Walt Disney animated films and turns the heroes of childhood into ghostly revenants. Harmless motifs are transformed into eerie scenes. Raymond Pettibon’s drawings, in turn, breathe the spirit of punk and underground. They are able to literally dissect the state of mind of Western society.

An overarching theme is the superhero. For example, African-American performance artist William Pope.L crawled the length of New York’s Broadway in a Superman outfit. In his bizarre inversion of the white superhero, he conspicuously dismantles the myth of American notions of omnipotence. The work, memorably titled The Great White Way, is updated for the exhibition in a special way. As early as 1967, Keiichi Tanaami, a representative of Japanese Pop Art, made the stumbling, broken hero the subject of a collage. He thus created an ironic counter-image to the Western influence on post-war society in Japan.

The invited artists take up familiar motifs and narratives of comics, which they edit, deconstruct, and reassemble in new guises. Many of the works are sometimes disturbing psychograms of society with surprising subversive-political references. By consciously referring back to the comic, art thus arrives at new forms of visual expression, becoming a site of particular aesthetic experiences and insights.