Richard McGuire - Popeye and Olive

Launch / Signing
December 1, 2023
6 - 8 PM

Popeye and Olive was born of an exercise in meditation through painting that Richard McGuire undertook several years ago. By tirelessly repeating shapes on paper, with no intention other than the gesture itself, the silhouette of Popeye emerged one day. From there, McGuire decided to make infinite variations on E. C. Segar's character, while bringing him back to his essence (muscle, a pipe and a cap), and then to do the same with Olive Oyl. Gradually, combinations are made, shapes complement each other and tell the story of the couple's interactions: rejection, attraction, competitiveness, tenderness... A relationship is born in the course of the drawings; it's now an abstract love story.

First published in 2001 by Éditions Cornélius in a silkscreen edition of 200 copies, Richard McGuire's "Popeye and Olive" is now reissued by Fotokino in a direct-tone offset version.

At the turn of the 1980s, barely out of college, Richard McGuire was roaming the streets of downtown New York, pasting up original drawings and posters that advertised the next show of his band, Liquid Liquid. On stage and in the galleries, he befriended those who were to define the art of the time.

In the 1990s, he began to take on illustration commissions, mainly for The New Yorker; wrote and illustrated children's books; and manufactured his own games and toys. In the 2000s, he designed and directed animated films, and made illustrated books, while preparing an experimental graphic novel which would become an essential piece in the history of comics. Here, published in 2014, tells the story of one location through time, using a unique multi- dimensional graphic system.

Since then, McGuire has produced a host of projects that combine graphic elegance, intelligent concepts, and a desire to experiment: an encapsulation of what might constitute the McGuire style. He’s had a thousand artistic lives and, after a career spanning more than 40 years, McGuire continues to explore, experiment, and research, without worrying about the boundaries between genres, but on the contrary, with a desire for fusion, between sound and image in particular.

40 pages
3-tone direct printing on Fedrigoni Arena Bulk 140g
15,5 x 21 cm
ISBN: 978-2-902565-56-6

© Fotokino