Adventurous and bold Comic Future alights at the Wex May 17–August 3

Columbus, OH—Comic Future, an exhibition of work by contemporary artists freely mixing figurative painting and gestural abstraction with the visual strategies of cartoons and comics, will be on view May 17–August 3, 2014 at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Appropriating subjects from mythology, advertising, print culture, consumerism, and children’s television, the fifteen artists whose work is on view in Comic Future employ discordant approaches that twist representations of their immediate environment into skewed, often apocalyptic visions of the future.

Organized by Fairfax Dorn, co-founder and executive director of Ballroom Marfa, the exhibition showcases about fifty works created from the 1960s through 2013 in a variety of media, including painting, video, sculpture, and collage.

Notes Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin, “Comic Future considers the highly inventive and disparate ways that contemporary artists have come to use the familiar visual language and tropes of cartoons and comics.  A compelling exhibition in its own right, Comic Future is an ideal complement to Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes and Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History, which will be on view concurrently in the Wexner Center galleries.”

Comic Future represents a wide range of artists and media, including career–spanning works on paper by Sigmar Polke, a comic-book collage by Walead Beshty, sculpture by Aaron Curry and Liz Craft, and a video by the always-provocative Paul McCarthy. The late Mike Kelley is represented by works from two series that bookend his influential career: an early grouping of doodle-like drawings and a selection of recent illuminated sculptures based on Superman’s home city of Kandor. Also on display are paintings by Arturo Herrera, Carroll Dunham, Lari Pittman, Dana Schutz, and Sue Williams that explore the uneasy boundary between abstraction and figuration.

Comic Future was on view at Ballroom Marfa September 27, 2013–February 2, 2014; no further stops beyond its Wexner Center appearance are scheduled.

EXHIBITION-RELATED EVENTS
An opening celebration will be held on Friday, May 16 from 6 to 9 pm. Walk-in tours, free with gallery admission, are scheduled throughout the exhibitions’ run. Visit http://wexarts.org for more details.