Philippe Labaune Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of original drawings by Paul Pope, on view in the Gallery’s Annex, celebrating the publication of THB 2. The selection comprises pages from the THB cycle together with covers and single-sheet drawings that extend outward into polar narrative, the lunar record, and the American West. Following the artist’s solo presentation with the Gallery in June 2025, the exhibition considers a body of work in which draftsmanship and empirical method are held in unusually close relation. Details at the link.
Pope’s formation traces a route from Ohio to Tokyo to New York, and his work registers each passage. A Midwestern candidness governs the choice of subject; a Japanese exactitude governs the line that describes it; and the surrealist readings of the city that recur throughout the work belong to the decades he has spent here. What results is a graphic vocabulary that cannot be pinpointed to any single national tradition.
The Japanese years remain the decisive episode. Pope entered the traditional mangaka system on its own terms, declining the accommodations customarily extended to a foreigner in favor of the full apprenticeship, and was trained under the standard conditions of deliberate isolation, kept apart from other draftsmen so that no two hands would converge. The pedagogy was one of speed and repetition, and its consequences are legible throughout the exhibition: in the assurance of the brush, in the refusal of correction, in the economy with which a figure is set down and then left alone.
The THB material constitutes the largest group. The three sheets from 36 Seconds sustain a countdown across a shifting panel architecture while the dialogue detains itself on idiom: whether to step on it, whether a figure of speech can be stepped on, what precisely one hopes to split. HR Does Not Not Foil Foil With Knot Know How extends a lesson in knots into a quarrel over double negatives, its verbal comedy set against passages of considerable graphic seriousness. The name THB derives from an invented chemical notation, the synthetic compound from which the character is constituted, and the invention is characteristic: fiction furnished with the apparatus of science.
That apparatus is never merely decorative. In preparing the Apollo 12 series, of which page 8 is included here, Pope established with an engineer what a hammer would weigh on the lunar surface and how it would behave suspended in an astronaut’s grip, and the drawing carries the authority of that verification. The mission itself was chosen to celebrate its uneventfulness, the single flight on which nothing failed. In a similar yet separate piece titled S, a figure is set against a ray-traced optical diagram of the eye, which reinforces Pope’s preference for the constrained realism of science fiction rather than the whimsical nature of the fantastical.
A second temper runs through the exhibition. The two Antarctica pages follow a man who has crossed eight hundred miles of ice to kill another and, on arrival, expends himself keeping him alive; the sequence dissolves in its final tier into brushed black and hand-drawn lettering, the picture surface overtaken by the words spoken across it. This piece, alongside Mother and Cubs, which depicts a wolf moving through an emptied landscape in three registers of diminishing scale, demonstrates the serious tone that juxtaposes some of Pope’s more light-hearted narrative works.
Economy of means unifies the group. Nearly all of the work is ink on board, executed with brush, screen tone, and adhesive film, materials and practices absorbed in Japan and turned toward subjects entirely his own. Pope carries narrative, information, and theme with remarkably few lines and fewer words, and he reads widely in the memoirs and essays of his contemporaries to understand how other draftsmen think. What results is not a manga style but a set of manga mechanics carrying a hand that belongs to no one else, work that draws on two traditions and settles into neither, cohering instead through a sensibility that is entirely his own.
We warmly invite you to join us for the opening reception on Saturday, August 1st, from 4-7pm. Come experience the exhibition and enjoy a glass of wine in the presence of the artist.
Philippe Labaune Gallery | 534 W 24th St., New York, NY | (212) 229-2400
