BY: SINEAD MULHERN
This winter, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) will be displaying rarely-seen art from illustrator and Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman.
The exhibit titled, Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A Retrospective, comes to the AGO on Dec. 20, 2014 and runs until Mar. 15, 2015.
The artist who has been described by the gallery as “a tireless innovator who is unafraid to tackle difficult subject matter” has an incredibly admirable career well worth viewing.
A main focus for the exhibit will be his two-volume graphic novel, Maus, one of his best-known works. Maus tells the story of Spiegelman’s parents living in Nazi-occupied Poland and later in Auschwitz. In 1992, it won a Pulitzer Prize becoming the first and only of its category to win the award. The original manuscripts will be on display at the winter exhibit—a rare occurrence due to their fragility.
Speigelman is an artist who draws inspiration from across the board: politics, Cubism, the Holocaust, even detective fiction. Along with the Maus manuscripts will be his less famous works dating back as far as his teens and early twenties. A staple in his career is the illustrations he created for the pages (and cover) of The New Yorker. Among the 300 works selected from this artist’s career will be the iconic black-on-black 9-11 New Yorker cover.
CO-MIX: A Retrospective was curated by Andrew Hunter, the AGO’s Fredrik S. Eaton curator of Canadian Art. It’s put on by the AGO in collaboration with the Jewish Museum of New York and was organized by Rina Zavagli-Mattotti of Paris’s Galerie Martel.
The exhibit was first shown in France during the 2012 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée.
Those who swing by the AGO can see the exhibit for the general admission price.
