WAL*ART Gallery is pleased to present been here, did this, a major exhibition of new work by well-known Los Angeles graphic artist Mick Haggerty. The exhibition runs from November 21st to December 6th, 2009.

Before records were reduced to ringtones, Mick Haggerty’s radical images for album covers and music videos helped define the image of rock and roll. Under a variety of aliases – art attack in the 70’s, neo-plastics in the 80’s, and brains in the 90’s, he art directed, illustrated, photographed, designed and video-taped almost any performer who would let him, including David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, The Police, Jimi Hendrix, B-52’s, Aerosmith, Violent Femmes, ELO, John Lydon, King Crimson, Roxy Music, OMD, Simple Minds, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, and his groundbreaking illustrations appeared on everything from Vanity Fair to Time Magazine. For the past few years, Haggerty has focused his attention on books and prints and this exhibition features recent work made in Durban, South Africa. As he describes it, “Borne out of frustration and a limitation of means, I started to fill sketch books with small automatic drawings of heads. These strange characters from nowhere just seemed to appear on the page. The work in this show grew from those encounters.”

Gary Panter describes Haggerty’s new body of work: “I see real people in many of them; simpletons and fools; the ancient and deprived; the snaggle-toothed, halt and lame; the rejects of the rejects … I have seen these people all my life, in the mental wards of Oklahoma or walking back-roads alone glimpsed out of car windows, or in news photos of the blind and cursed and feeble. They are pretending to be funny and goofy, but they are not the simple fun one gets in a glimpse. Compassion is encoded in them.”

The exhibition includes over thirty prints made in South Africa as well as paintings and two limited edition books.

Published by Amanda on November 10, 2009 01:55 pm under News