Developed in close collaboration with the artist, the retrospective Chris Ware shows the oeuvre of this major US author and cartoonist in all its richness. Born in 1967 in Omaha, Chris Ware published very early in the avant-garde magazine RAW, which was edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. In the early 1990s, he launched his extensive Acme Novelty series, in which he established his most important characters. Chris Ware draws with perfectionist meticulousness and technical precision. In terms of both narrative and form, his books are all-encompassing artworks, in which he is responsible for everything from the typography to the binding. This exhibition demonstrates how, via exploratory preliminary sketches, he arrives at his carefully composed sequences of images reminiscent of plans and construction drawings. From a wide variety of perspectives and within a unique concentrated density, the reader finds out about human inadequacies, communication difficulties and disappointments. The elaborately produced set of comics Building Stories from 2012 is particularly impressive. This is a collection of 15 books, in very different formats, which have no predetermined order, but are meant to be discovered and connected individually by the reader. It won the Special Jury Prize at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2013. Alongside his major graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan (2000), Building Stories (2012) and Rusty Brown (2020), Chris Ware works for the press, particularly The New Yorker, and has been involved in the production of animations based on his main characters Quimby the Mouse and Rusty Brown. The retrospective presents originals from this exceptional artist’s most important works, along with objects, such as models, sculptures and constructions, which complement his stories in the third dimension.
