Guest curator: Anne Richard / HEY! modern art & pop culture Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l'Image (musée de la bande dessinée), Angoulême, France The Musée de la bande dessinée d'Angoulême has invited Anne Richard (founder and curator of the magazine HEY! Modern art & pop culture) to exhibit within its walls, and in resonance with its collections, a work emblematic of the magazine's artistic commitment. For this first act, she has chosen to present the painter Chris Mars through a selection of pieces (oil paintings, scratch cards), recent and old, rarely seen in France. This reference artist is recognized for his role at the heart of Lowbrow Art, an American movement born of the encounter between pop culture and the alternative cultural scenes of the 50s/60s/70s. Challenging the hierarchical boundaries separating "high art" from popular culture, and nourished by a traumatic family experience, Chris Mars' virtuoso, self-taught painting celebrates individuals stigmatized by conditions of life or birth, autopsies the mechanisms of marginality, and questions the condemnation that is exclusion. The exhibition opens a dialogue between paintings and comics: Chris Mars' color work offers a fresh look at the works of Jim Woodring, Bill Sienkiewicz, Moebius and Nicolas de Crécy. The painter's anger in the face of injustice echoes Philippe Druillet's ordeal on the death of his beloved wife. Confronted with his older brother's illness, Chris Mars pointed to David B.'s vibrant L'Ascension du Haut-Mal series - apart from their detestation of a certain kind of medicine, the two artists have many other things in common. Mark Beyer, Gus Bofa, Alex Barbier, Schuiten & Peeters and Jean-Claude Forest also resonate in other keys. The mises en abime developed are protean; the springs used are most often sensitive, internal to the artists' individual journeys and life experiences. Since 2010, HEY! has devoted itself to the unusual and out-of-the-ordinary forms of contemporary creation. Modern art & pop culture reaffirms the intrinsic aesthetic value of the productions published in its pages, and shows how popular art invests contemporary art.