Nicole Rudick

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  books October 31, 2022

  Still Hot

  WILD THINGS ARE HAPPENING: THE ART OF MAURICE SENDAK. Edited by Jonathan Weinberg. Delmonico Books/The Columbus Museum of Art, 2022. 248 pages.

  THE FRONT AND BACK ENDPAPERS of Maurice Sendak’s perennially beloved 1963 book Where the Wild Things Are are covered in subdued bursts of foliage in yellow, blue, green, orange, and brown. The thicket of leafy plants is overlaid by a loose grid of hatch marks that have always made me think of the fine mesh of a window screen. The reader’s face looms just before the screen, with only a view of the semi-exotic jungle beyond, but it’s a view ripe for an

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  passages May 29, 2021

  Karl Wirsum (1939–2021)

  FOR A BOOKLET published on the occasion of the third Hairy Who exhibition in Chicago, in 1968, Karl Wirsum drew a woman whose head has been replaced by a mandala—not a groovy meditative symbol but a pulsating, agitated, electrified pattern vibrating in red, blue, yellow, and green. This must have been what the inside of Wirsum’s mind looked like: protean and always switched on. For sixty years—from his graduation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1961, through his association with the Hairy Who in the mid to late ’60s, and right up to his death on May 6—Wirsum produced a legion

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  books October 2017

  Dominique Goblet’s Pretending Is Lying

  Pretending Is Lying, by Dominique Goblet; translated by Sophie Yanow. New York: New York Review Comics, 2017. 149 pages.

  THE RAW EMOTION of Pretending Is Lying, a memoir by the Belgian cartoonist Dominique Goblet, is already hinted at in the book’s introductory story. A child—the author as a young girl—is injured in a tumble on the sidewalk and tended to in a moment of parental magic: Goblet’s mother instantly repairs the torn knees of her daughter’s stockings by having Goblet simply put them on backward. The winsome anecdote ends brightly, but the strip is rendered in sharp red lines

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  books November 2016

  Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force

  Puke Force, by Brian Chippendale. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2015. 120 pages.

  NOISE IS IN THE EAR OF THE BEHOLDER—a “catchall phrase for overwhelming stuff with abstract elements or ‘energy,’ elements involving harsher tendencies,” as Brian Chippendale said in a 2012 interview with The Believer. Noise, as a category and a descriptor, is frequently used to characterize Chippendale’s music: the pummeling drum lines and incoherent vocals of the two-man band Lightning Bolt. But it’s in the eye of the beholder, too: The term is often deployed as a shorthand description of the style of his

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  interviews March 08, 2013

  James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook

  James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook are New York–based artists who, in 1984, opened the East Village gallery Ground Zero, which showed pioneering installation, performance, and multimedia work. One of their earliest artists was David Wojnarowicz, the painter, photographer, performance artist, and filmmaker whose provocative work helped define the downtown scene and the rising tide of AIDS activism.

  In the mid-1980s, the trio began collaborating on 7 Miles a Second, a comic book based on Wojnarowicz’s autobiographical writings. Drawn and edited by Romberger and colored by Van Cook, it is a

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  picks October 28, 2011

  Gary Panter

  Gary Panter’s first solo show at Fredericks & Freiser is an odd affair. It is presented much like a debut exhibition, with introductory remarks about his general style, yet it offers a quarter century of work. What's more, the show’s twenty paintings on canvas and paper draw from the entire length of his production to date, with a focus on his recent works, but the selection does not aptly represent his breadth. Still, one is given a sense of Panter’s versatility and omnivorous art-historical and pop-cultural consumption. His newest canvases, of which there are several here, pit Op art’s illusory

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  picks July 15, 2011

  Rachell Sumpter

  The seven paintings in Rachell Sumpter’s latest exhibition—bright, delicate evocations of tribal existence in forests thick with plant life—measure just under one square foot each. Populated by impossibly small human figures and vines the width of a thread, these tiny tableaux articulate the intimate aspect of communal living while also setting it awash in the vastness of the natural world. They are akin in this regard to Justine Kurland’s photographs of families set amid the idylls of nature, as in her 2007 series “Of Woman Born.” Family (all works 2011), whose blue-green palette and upward-trailing

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  film December 21, 2009

  Comic Strip

  CINEMATIC IS OFTEN A FRAUGHT TERM when used to describe comics. On the one hand, it can aptly express a story’s visual syntax (close-ups, jump cuts, dissolves); applied a different way, however, it derogatorily suggests that a series of panels are ready-made storyboards. But for a cartoonist like Dash Shaw, who revels in drawing’s fluidity and expressive imperfections, the transition between comics and animation is a natural one. His splendid four-part animated web series for IFC.com, The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D., underscores what’s best about all of his work—its eclecticism and

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  picks October 27, 2009

  Mariah Robertson

  While most young photographers plunge into theory, politics, or portraiture to develop their themes, Mariah Robertson can’t get out of the darkroom. Her aim is to explore the process of making pictures, rather than making meaning, and she uses all the technological tools at her disposal—color separation, oversaturated hues, photograms, chemical drips, and so on—to disrupt the form’s conventions.

  Cut haphazardly from large rolls of photographic paper and allowed to curl and buckle within their frames (making them sculptures as much as photographs), the seventeen images in this show mix the aesthetics

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  interviews August 10, 2009

  Andrei Molotiu

  Andrei Molotiu is an artist and art historian who teaches at Indiana University, Bloomington, and who recently edited Abstract Comics: The Anthology, the first collection devoted to the genre. Offering experiments by established cartoonists as well as new pieces by emerging artists, the book is available from Fantagraphics and will serve as the exhibition catalogue for “Silent Pictures,” which opens on September 1 at the CUNY Graduate Center’s James Gallery. Nautilus, a collection of Molotiu’s own abstract comics, has just been published by Fahrenheit Editions.

  ABSTRACT COMICS ARE COMICS that

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  picks June 30, 2009

  Basil Wolverton

  What do Miss Bedney Flunt, Miss Fludney Bent, Miss Flentney Bunt, and Miss Blentney Funt have in common? Unreasonably odd proboscises and the hilarious misfortune of being drawn by Basil Wolverton. An artist and writer of sci-fi and humor comics from the 1930s through the ’70s and an alum of Mad magazine in subsequent decades, Wolverton showed a consistent partiality for screwball portraiture, and the nearly 150 works in this exhibition constitute “a ghastly gang of goops” (to borrow a phrase from the artist himself). His mid-’60s sketches of illogically deformed heads for Topps chewing-gum

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  print May 2009

  Ben Jones

  In Ben Jones’s New Painting and Drawing, a slim book of images published last year by PictureBox, song lyrics by the noise rock band Polvo serve as an epigraph (and the volume’s only text): “Show me something round and I’ll analyze the form / Teaching us the code that makes us crack.” It’s hard to think of a more apt description of Jones’s practice. In his second New York solo show, a smart, energetic installation of drawings, paintings, light boxes, sculptures, and digital videos, Jones makes form—specifically, fundamental geometric shapes—his primary medium; his aim is to reveal the elements