Richard McGuire’s path from post-punk to street art to cult comic
Published: Thursday, Jun 6th 2024, 14:21
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Richard McGuire's art is wild and concentrated, loud and sensual, funny and serious. With the exhibition "Then and There, Here and Now", the Cartoonmuseum Basel presents a musician, illustrator and painter who can hardly be reduced to a single denominator.
As a member of the New York avant-garde band Liquid Liquid, McGuire created a bassline in the 1980s that was later adopted by many hip-hop greats. At the same time, the multi-talented artist, born in 1957, moved around the city as a street artist until he laid the foundation for his main and masterpiece in Art Spiegelman's comic magazine "RAW" in 1989.
These were the first drawings for the graphic novel "Hier", which was first published in 2014 and made him a star of the scene. In this work, he unleashes a time machine in an apartment building that whirls past, present and future in a time frame of millions of years.
In one room of the Cartoon Museum, original drawings of the comic strip are on display, as well as sketches that he produced using various techniques and which could be considered works of art in their own right.
Art without borders
But McGuire is much more than just a comic artist. He has created enigmatic, dystopian animated films and highly imaginative children's books. He has created three-dimensional objects and, among many other things, a series of prints and paintings in which he translates the cult comic characters Popeye and Olivia into the abstract.
Even if they look like tools or laboratory equipment, they always remain recognizable as Popeye and Olivia. One of the highlights of the exhibition is a room with the covers for "The New Yorker" magazine. These are mostly brightly colored hidden object images that celebrate or condemn life in New York - if not both at the same time.
The exhibition "Richard McGuire. Then and There, Here and Now" at the Cartoonmuseum Basel can be seen until November 3.
©Keystone/SDA
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