Previous Exhibitions

Steve Brodner | Dan Yaccarino | Hello World | Luba Lukova
Geoff Graham | Charles Burns | Hatch Show Print

Charles Burns
October 20 - December 7, 2001

At the juncture of fiction and memory, of cheap thrills and horror, lies the dark world of Charles Burns. His stories, which first attracted notice in the pages of RAW during the early 1980s, take comic book clichZ©s ‹ wiseacre kids, sinister scientists, tough-as-nails detectives, teenage lust and EC-style horror ‹ and rearrange them into disturbing yet funny patterns. Beneath this interplay of familiar iconography lurks the real traumas of childhood, traumas of loss and alienation. Similarly, Burnsâ ice-cold artwork polishes a ãconventionalä comic look to the nth degree, underlying the artificiality of what we take for normal. At times, Burnsâ work suggests that our worst fears about mainstream comics are true: that they are stamped out by machines programmed by someone who is slightly going insane.

Burns has also forged a career out of comics. He has designed sets for a New York production of The Nutcracker, has illustrated covers for Time magazine, and produced album covers for performers such as Iggy Pop. Burns lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with his wife, painter Susan Moore, and their two daughters.