Pushwagner

Soft City

28.6. – 2.9.2012

Hariton Pushwagner, Self-portrait, 2002. Screenprint. Pushwagner Collection, Oslo. Copyright © 2012 the artist.

Pushwanger: Soft City, Cube Gallery Installation. Photo Derek Wales.

Pushwanger: Soft City, Cube Gallery Installation. Photo Andy Keate.

Hariton Pushwagner, Almost There. From A Day in the Life of Family Man, 1980. Image courtesy and copyright the artist.

Hariton Pushwagner, Music II. From A Day in the Life of Family Man, 1980. Image courtesy and copyright the artist.

Pushwanger: Soft City, Middle Gallery Installation. Photo Derek Wales.

Pushwanger: Soft City, Long Gallery Installation. Photo Derek Wales.

Pushwagner, Klaxton. Pushwagner Collection. Image courtesy the artist.

Hariton Pushwagner, Jobkill. From Apokalypse. Image courtesy and copyright the artist.

Animation Soft City: Pushwagner © 2008. All Rights reserved.

Pushwagner: Soft City

28 June - 2 September 2012

This is the first solo exhibition outside of Norway by artist Pushwagner (born Oslo, 1940), bringing together drawings, paintings and prints made over the last forty years. His visionary practice resonates with the glamour of Pop Art, the language of science fiction, the anti-materialism of the Beat poets and the hallucinations of Vincent Van Gogh.

The exhibition includes his defining creation, the graphic novel ‘Soft City’, which encapsulates a generation’s disenchantment with capitalism and life in the modern city. It also includes a series of prints that depict the trappings of power, featuring one of the principal characters in Pushwagner’s mythology: ‘The Boss’. This omnipotent bureaucrat sits behind a massive desk of levers and switches and controls the world via a giant screen. In the Long Gallery, the Apocalypse Frieze comprises obsessively detailed paintings where factories double up as death camps and the ravages of war are perpetuated under the watchful eye of robotic men in suits.

Pushwagner’s epic satire exaggerates and ridicules the symbols of capitalism, war, industry and leisure. This critique of power and greed, most dramatically expressed through the giant mouth on the Gallery’s façade, takes on a particular resonance in the context of today’s financial crises.

Following its presentation in Milton Keynes, the exhibition will be presented at Haugar Vestfold Art Museum, Norway (22 September - 30 December 2012) and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Netherlands (2 February - 28 April 2013).

The Pushwagner exhibition has been generously supported by Fritt Ord (The Freedom of Expression Foundation, Norway), Norsk Kulturrad (Norwegian Arts Council), OCA (Office for Contemporary Art Norway) and The Royal Norwegian Embassy, London.

The exhibition is an associated event of IF: Milton Keynes International Festival 2012, and forms part of Milton Keynes Summer of Culture.