Philly’s Comix Pioneer R. Crumb at UArts Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery

Written by Alan Auger Thursday, 29 December 2011 20:33

Philadelphia, PA - With coarse humor and keen satire, the irreverent and subversive works of Philly guy R. Crumb come home for their first Philadelphia one-person exhibition, My True Inner Self.  One of the most influential artists of the Underground Comix movement, Crumb is often compared to Durer, Brueghel and Goya.  His sexualized, sexist, anarchistic and perverse drawings have influenced generations of artists from Philip Guston, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Mike Kelley to today’s wheatpasters and manga artists.  New York’s Paul Morris Gallery and private collectors provided the show’s works, which range from small sculptures to self portraits to notebooks full of observational sketches, all from the early 1960s through 2000.

Crumb’s iconic Mr. Natural was first published in Philadelphia on May 5, 1967, by Brian Zahn in the underground tabloid Yarrowstalks.  Crumb’s character panoply includes Snoid, Schuman the Human, Eggs Ackley, Fritz the Cat and Flakey Foont, all of whom who came alive in Zap Comix, Village Voice and other publications.  The cover of Janis Joplin’s Big Brother & the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills (1967) was a classic album design, as was his poster Stoned agin! (sic), which was included in the mammoth exhibition Les Annees Pop at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2001.  Cologne’s Ludwig Museum presented a major Crumb retrospective in 2003.  His work was also included in a traveling exhibition Masters of American Comics organized by UCLA’s Hammer Museum.

On exhibition 22 January until 27 February, 2007 at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery @ The University of the Arts - 333 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102. Visit : www.uarts.edu/events/rwg/index.cfm