A photo of a white porcelain plate on a blue shiny fabric background. There is a cartoon drawn on the plate featuring 4 stand up comedians. The title stretches across the top saying "Art World Stand-up Comedy Contestants".

Pablo Helguera | Untitled (Comedy Show) plate

$150.00 $

About the Limited Edition Plate

Untitled (Comedy Show)
by Pablo Helguera
Limited Edition of 50
Commissioned by More Art
2023

Pablo Helguera began his iconic Artoon series—featuring handrawn cartoons about the artworld— in 2009. For Helguera’s 2023 project, titled Untitled (Comedy Show), presented from February 1st through 4th at the Laurie Beechman Theater in New York, More Art commissioned a limited edition collectible plate featuring an original Artoon.

I started Artoons as a joke on Facebook, when that social platform was born. I didn’t know what to put on my wall and one day it occurred to me to put a drawing in the style of the cartoons—technically they are called ‘single panel cartoons’—that are usually seen in the New Yorker magazine, although with a perspective from inside the art world. I was not interested in dealing with the clichés that criticize contemporary art as something incomprehensible or eccentric—for those of us who live it on a daily basis, those points of view are like the comments of an ignorant tourist who arrives in a country and believes that local kitsch is the authentic culture—but to comment on the real experiences that we as professionals have on a daily basis: the strange social tensions we live through, the relationship we have with collectors, curators…

— Excerpt from an interview with Helguera in El Tiempo newspaper, Bogotá, 2017.

 

In stock

Product Description

1 Porcelain Plate, 10.875” diameter
Limited Edition of 50
Commissioned by More Art
2023

This elegant white porcelain coupe plate was manufactured in Poland, with printing completed by Maryland China in the United States. All graphics on the plate were screen printed and kiln fired.

This product is food-safe, dishwasher-safe and lead-free.

About Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York-based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work focuses on a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction.

His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work for the new generation of artworks regarded under the area of socially engaged art.

Pablo Helguera performed individually at the Museum of Modern Art /Gramercy Theater, in 2003, where he showed his work “Parallel Lives.” His musical composition, “Endingness” has been performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; ICA Boston;  RCA London; 8th Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05, Havana; Shedhalle, Zurich; MoMA P.S.1, New York; Brooklyn Museum; IFA Galerie, Bonn; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; MALBA museum in Buenos Aires, Ex-Teresa Espacio Alternativo in Mexico City, The Bronx Museum, Artist Space, and Sculpture Center, amongst many others. His work has been reviewed in  Art in America, Artforum, The New York Times, ArtNews, amongst others. In 2008 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and also was the recipient of a 2005 Creative Capital Grant. In 2011 he was named winner of the International Award of Participatory Art of the Region Emilia-Romagna in Italy. He has also received the Franklin Furnace and Art Matters grants.