Richard McGuire visiting Paris for his first retrospective in (...)

Author as prolific as he is eclectic, Richard McGuire is part of a rather rare category: that of multi-talented authors, able to compose with universes as diverse as punk music, children’s toys, street art or even comics, while being successful in each of these disciplines.


Richard McGuire signing posters at Villa Belleville: Photo : Jorge Sanchez

Born in 1957 in New Jersey, he completed his studies in sculpture at Rutgers University and joined (with Basquiat and Keith Haring !), in the late 1970s, the band of young artists from the New York scene passionate about pop art and graffiti, while playing as a musician for the group Liquid Idiot (then became Liquid Liquid).


My Things, re-edition in Risography by Fotokino: My Things, re-edition in Risography by Fotokino

As for many novice creators, his early career is difficult, he must alternate his moments of creation with precarious jobs that allow him to pay his bills. Its only difference is that it will make creativity its main financial resource in the choice of its various uses. He thus developed during these first years a singular aptitude to go beyond the conventions of the medium and to implement his eclectic knowledge in his art.


Cover for the 1993 New Yorker: © Richard McGuire & The New Yorker .

In 1993, he managed to place a first cover for the New Yorker with an upside-down New Year’s image that readers could enjoy upside down and upside down. It was the start of an intense collaboration that made him one of the leading figures in North American illustration.

Reflection of this vast and diverse journey, the exhibition at Photo cinema offers us for the first time a retrospective encompassing all the dimensions of his work: posters, graphics, toys, comic strips, illustrations for the New Yorker… The walls of the Marseille art center immediately look more like those of a loose workshop than a museum!

After visiting his exhibition in Marseille, his presence in Paris last Tuesday was undoubtedly the perfect opportunity to ask him a few questions, starting by questioning his career in the world of comics …


Cover for the 1995 New Yorker: © Richard McGuire & The New Yorker .

Richard McGuire : To be frank, I have always considered myself a plastic artist, a sculptor, then everything else! My influences come from everywhere, and it’s thanks to Spiegelman, the author of mouse, that I motivated myself to make graphic novels for adults. For me, doing comics, I understood it as an exercise to find and define a code of shapes capable of functioning in several scenarios, as Spiegelman says, “Comics are diagrams! “.

In fact, in your work, we often find more superimpositions of boxes than cohabitations between them as in a classic waffle iron …

It’s just because I focus more on the structure than the storytelling. For example, to build my work Here (Right here) [1], I had to build a model in order to get an idea of the space and the nuances of colors and lights. Most of the time, I think like a sculptor who must arrange volumes in harmony.

In your illustrations and comics, urban space is often a territory made up of several temporalities and sound spatialities. How could the experience of confinement have changed or enriched this?

Precisely, at the start of the pandemic, I decided to move to a small village north of New York. In this new rural environment, I was able to discover a new sensitivity. I enjoyed how the sounds of nature can become a new source of inspiration. After years in a big city, you become much more attentive to nuances. My new ambition is precisely the visual transcription (narrative if you will) of the sound experience. This is the reason for my new book, of which a small contingent has been printed by Fotokino: Listen, which is a demonstration of that.


Richard McGuire exhibition at Fotokino: Richard McGuire exhibition at Fotokino. Photo: Jorge Sanchez

In this little book of about sixty pages, lines and geometric shapes evolve on a monochrome background and illustrate the different sounds that the author has named and arranged on the edges of the frames.

A motley object, evolving between visual poetry and the minimalist compositions of his press boards, McGuire has undoubtedly not stopped his quest for renewal beyond conventions!