George Herriman: Krazy Kat es Krazy Kat es Krazy Kat

George Herriman (New Orleans, 1880-Los Angeles, 1944), considered one of the most important figures of the American comic, belongs to a generation of pioneering authors who developed their work under the cover of newspapers that began to include comic strips in their pages at the beginning of the 20th century. Herriman’s work had a great influence among a large number of artists such as Willem de Kooning or Öyvind Fahlström, as well as intellectuals and writers such as E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot or Jack Kerouac – and it was born in parallel to the development of the comic as a new artistic language, emerging in the United States at the end of the 19th century. This new medium brought with it a series of visual findings based on the repetition of schemes and patterns that already had important narrative achievements in this first stage.
Presenting over 160 works, the exhibition aims to explore the relationships and influences between comics and other artistic languages, as well as to question and reflect on the dynamics of valuation and legitimation of art, and specifically of comics, reviled by traditional historiography as an art ” inferior “, or as an artistic by-product associated with the concept of” low culture “and aimed at a child audience.