Soft City

The legendary Norwegian pop artist Pushwagner’s scathing comics masterpiece—lost for decades, and never before published in the U.S.—is an epic vision of a single day in a world gone wrong: a brightly smiling, disturbingly familiar dystopia of towering skyscrapers, omnipresent surveillance, and endless distant war. “CLEAN BOMB THE HAPPY-HAPPY WAY,” blares the morning paper. “Heil Hilton!” barks an overlord on the news.

Welcome to Soft City. Now don’t be late for work.

Hariton Pushwagner (Terje Brofos) was born in Oslo, Norway, in 1940. He studied at the School of Arts and Crafts and the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts. After graduating in 1966, he became a set painter for Norwegian state television, and in 1968 began collaborating with the Norwegian author Axel Jensen on a series of graphic novels and illustrations. In 1969, he started work on Soft City, which was completed in 1975 but then lost; it was rediscovered in Oslo in 2002. The original art for Soft City was exhibited both in the 2008 Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art and the Sydney Biennial. Pushwagner’s work has been displayed in galleries and museums all over the world, including in New York, Berlin, Sydney, Paris, and London. Chris Ware is the author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Building Stories, which was deemed a Top Ten Fiction Book of the Year by The New York Times and Time magazine. A contributor to The New Yorker, his work has been exhibited at the MoCa Los Angeles, the MCA Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Martin Herbert is associate editor of ArtReview and a regular contributor to Artforum, frieze, and Art Monthly. His monograph Mark Wallinger was published in 2011.