Barcelona,
If a cartoonist of our time has become classic and has nourished herself of the work of past teachers (not only in what has to do with comics, also with literature in general), that is Chris Ware, the father of Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On EarthAmbitious and aware of the possibilities of his environment to take from Tolstoy the will to turn fiction into a reflection of life, of Nabokov the intertwining of words and images that supports all his works and James Joyce the attention to the subjectivity and awareness of his characters, which assumes the challenge of moving to the visual field. Speaking of aesthetics, their sources of influence are Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman.
Now the creations of Ware, with the common seal of deploying an empathic vision towards all its characters, even the most likely to generate rejection, are the object of an extensive sample in the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, which already carried out a fruitful expository incursion in the comic with the “Graphic Constellation” project, two years ago. The human dimension of his work claims this proposal, -a lot more deep than politics, no matter how its covers to The New Yorker They have portrayed the recent polarization of American society, the social evils generated by the pandemic or the relational fractures derived from the massive use of the Internet-; It also deepens the notion, defended by the American, that drawing is to think as it allows to structure ideas, reveal rhythms and patterns and develop peculiar architectures.
Under the commissioner of Jordi Costa, the tour collects original pieces, objects, audiovisuals, books and sculptures that will highlight how, indeed, Ware writes with vignettes and has been doing so from its first drawing notebooks to the aforementioned designs for the New Yorker or his works consider essential: the own Jimmy correct, Building Stories Yy Rusty Brown; This exhibition is precise is an expanded adaptation of “Building Chris Ware”, which could be seen at the Angulema Festival in 2022 and which has later Itinerado to Paris, Basel, Pordenone, Haarlem and Leipzig, before causing in Barcelona.
The exhibition begins remembering that more than thirty years ago, in 1993, the first issue of Acme novelty library, at a time when the American comic authors could control their headwaters and experiment in their pages. The specimens of Acmewithout going any further, they changed format with each other keeping their roots in popular culture: it was in them where Ware’s first characters appeared, being part of the increasingly elaborate narratives in which they were integrated, we must not forget it, loins, textures or covers, which melted with the message of the interior.
Together with several of the comics published in that series, we will see in the CCCB a miniature book dispenser in exchange for keys, a 3D viewer of images published as cut -out, original drawings and dolls made by Ware himself.
A second section of the sample is for Jimmy correctHistory about difficult families, about loneliness and abandonment, which had an autobiographical component: this author said that the hours required by reading were the ones that had been able to pass with his father, which abandoned the family. It was published a quarter of a century, it develops in the Chicago of the universal exhibition of 1893 and an imaginary city of Michigan a later century and has very rich narrative resources in what has to do with the representation of dead times, the transitions between scenes and the gestures of the characters.
Also account for its own chapter Quimby The Mousecomics where the artist paid tribute to pioneer comics and free forms that had most inspired him, especially Krazy Kat of George Herriman. His works are starring a mouse and a cat’s head, and his base is equally autobiographical, this time in relation to nostalgia towards his adolescence, which he lived with his grandmother; Each image must be interpreted as a sign, so the simplified treatment of the figures, similar to musical notes or typefaces.
In addition to virtuous comic maker, Ware has exercised as a rescuer of creations from the origins of the medium, whose history knows in depth. He has edited works by George Herriman, Frank King and Cliff Sterrett, whose narrative and formal solutions partially adopted: we refer to the poetic surrealism of the first, the realism of the second humanist of the second and the features of the vanguard art of the third.
Interested in very diverse facets of creation, Ware also studied architecture: he is interested in old buildings, has criticized the formalism of our time and has raised more than once the similarities between the construction of a building, the design of a page and the articulation of a story. He used ten years to elaborate Building Storiesa box with fourteen very different editorial objects and without a defined reading order: books with loin from fabric to puzzles or game boards; Everyone’s thematic center was an old Chicago Apartment building with its own voice and existence.
It was a project as subtle as complex, like the monumental Rusty Brown, Human tragicomedy of which only one first part has seen. It consists of four chapters that begin with the first day of the Institute of the Alison and Chaky brothers; It then starts a succession of parallel actions in which Ware himself drops, as an art professor, and in which he talks about the discovery of sexuality, the management of science fiction, bullying and the need for understanding of the different. Among the pieces related to this work in the exhibition, there is no lack of an analyzed fragment.
They also have their contributions to their own section to The New Yorkerwhich can be understood globally as a chronicle of the recent transformations of American society -the writer Zadie Smith explains in an interview their vision of them; His drawing notebooks, reverse of his editorial production, where he organizes his observations from a much more motley and less clear aesthetic than in his final compositions; covers and comics linked to ragtimemusical genre that Ware loves (he is a banjo and piano interpreter); and the didactic materials that he has designed as a professor of the subject Printed media in the Art Institute of Chicago.
In sum, the multiple ways offers us to immerse ourselves in the language of a central author in the comic of the late twentieth and early century, which is by way of emotion.
“Chris Ware. Drawing is thinking”
Center for Contemporary Culture. CCCB
C/ Montalegre, 5
Barcelona
From April 3 to November 9, 2025
