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Comic Book Images Get Serious

I am a big fan of Christian Marclay, having seen his monumental work “The Clock” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2013. “The Clock,” which won the Golden Lion award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, is a 24-hour video loop made up of scenes from films and television shows where a timepiece is present somewhere, sometimes in the far background or tucked into a corner of the screen. The time shown in the frame is always the REAL TIME - meaning if the viewer is watching "The Clock" at 3:24 p.m. - somewhere in the currently shown scene is a clock, be it Big Ben or a digital clock on a car dashboard - that is showing 3:24 p.m.


Relative to “The Clock,” the current show at Fraenkel is unassuming - 16 collages, plus one video piece - but regardless the show packs a lot of power. It mostly includes sliced and diced comic book images. All the pieces are engaging, and inventive - which is a hard trick to pull off in the genre of collage. Layers of pattern push and pull against the hieroglyphic story lines. A few of the pieces consist of isolated shapes in the middle of the picture plane, but in the majority of the pieces the image goes to the edge, implying that the picture is a snippet of a much larger vision.


The work pays tribute to and updates the Pop sensibility of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and bases the architecture of many of the pieces on the cubist principles of Picasso and Braque.


The show runs through March 25, 2021 at Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary Street, San Francisco. By appointment only.


Here are some of my favorite pieces from the show:


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