Chris Ware. To Draw Is to Think

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Chris Ware is an artist who, definitely, has marked a turning point in the evolution of the medium in which he has developed his work: a comic strip that, in his hands, has experienced a radical leap that no small number of analysts have compared to what literary expression experienced at the hands of James Joyce in Ulysses.

Born in Omaha (Nebraska), trained as an artist in Texas and resident in Chicago—significantly, the city where the American comic book began to assert its potential for adult expression and complex narrative at the beginning of the 20th century—Chris Ware became known in the early 1990s through his own magazine Acme Novelty Library. His multi-award-winning first long-term work, Jimmy Corrigan (2000), turned the experience of abandonment into the key to a family saga that stretched from the Chicago World Fair of 1893 to the present day. The Building Stories box set (2012) followed the life trajectories of the inhabitants of an old building, constructing a complex narrative without a set order of reading. In Rusty Brown (2019), a work still in progress, Ware uses the fractal structure of snowflakes to relate a heterogeneous list of characters marked by loss, melancholy, and vital failure in the landscapes of Nebraska.

This exhibition invites you to chronologically tour the art of this master of comics with a wide selection of original work, animations, objects and sculptural pieces, with the focus placed on his invention of language. His taste for ragtime and architectures full of memory, his influences, the most political and uncomfortable aspects of his discourse, the meticulous analysis of his expressive resources, and a careful look at his narrative genius by writer Zadie Smith make up some essential points of this journey into the inner universe of a true contemporary classic.

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