Israeli illustrator and comic book artist Rutu Modan had a show of her works at the Philippe Labaune Gallery in New York City earlier this spring, in a joint show with French artists Elizabeth Columba and Catherine Meurisse.
The exhibition showcased different projects by the three women artists with different cultures and backgrounds. It was a collaboration between the Israeli cultural office in New York, the French Consulate and the Philippe Labaune Gallery.
Modan, born in 1966, met iconoclastic American graphic novelist and cartoonist Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus, when she was a student at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and he influenced her to try her hand at comics. She collaborated with the writer Yirmi Pinkus to undertake her first works and in 1995 formed the Actus Tragicus collective, which is recognized as the avant-garde of Hebrew comics. In 2005, she was chosen as an outstanding artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation. Rutu Modan uses elements of popular culture, situation comedy, and a clear line style for graphic novels dealing with serious and complex subjects. She tackled terrorist attacks in Exit Wounds in 2007, the memory of the Shoah in Property in 2013 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Tunnels in 2021. These three books have had a strong global impact, winning awards in San Diego, Angoulême, and New York. As an illustrator, Modan regularly collaborates with the international press and for the New York Times in particular. Some of her children’s books have been published through Francoise Mouly’s Toon Books.
For more information: Philippe Labaune Gallery