2008
Exhibition at Chicago's Carl Hammer Gallery.
"Carl Hammer Gallery proudly welcomes the genius of Chris Ware back for another luminous solo appearance. This newest body of original work comes mainly from his two most recent publications The Acme Novelty Library #17 and #18. While most of the superlatives about the uncanny mastery Ware demonstrates in his story-telling art have already been said, new insights re his unique personal perspective on life culls a never-ending stream of new interpretation and understanding. He is the widely acknowledged giant within this burgeoning genre. Ware’s brilliance rests on his development of a language of simple graphics focusing on timelessly simple life experiences, transforming them into profound and understandable declarations concerning the human condition."
"In a The New Yorker article, October 17, 2005, Graphics novels come of age, Peter Schjeldahl calls Chris Ware, “the thirty-seven-year-old Chicagoan Picasso / Braque and young Eliot of graphic novels, whose “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” (2000, Pantheon) is, besides being viciously depressing, the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile. . . . Ware exercises an encyclopedic command of literary and cinematic tactics—stream of consciousness, montage—with tropes that are peculiar to graphic art: often effects of stillness, such as a character’s blank takes, in which you sense mental wheels turning (never to any very propitious end, in this case), and landscapes and cityscapes infused with a droning dailiness. He speeds and slows time, stops it, and can even seem to run it backward, revisiting and revising recent events, or sideways, incorporating alternative accounts of what’s happening. All this is done with utmost precision.”"
"Chris Ware’s newest work demonstrates a complexity and a uniqueness of mind and of a creative process which is not to be tapped out any time soon. He makes the most common of day to day life experiences appear fragile, turning them into awesome realizations of the tenuousness of life itself."
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