From co-creating Tank Girl to defining the visual identity of the cartoon band Gorillaz, Jamie Hewlett is one of the most active pop culture figures of the past two decades.
Launching soon will be Hewlett's first major monograph, gathering over 400 of his artworks from strips to sketches, to celebrate a polymath artist who refuses to be pigeonholed in a particular practice.
With influences ranging from hip-hop to zombie slasher movies, Hewlett emerged in the mid-1990s as co-creator of the zeitgeist-defining Tank Girl comic. With then-roommate Damon Albarn, he went on to create the unique cartoon band Gorillaz, a virtual pop group of animated characters, who have recorded five albums and mounted breathtaking live spectacles.
Since then, Hewlett has continued to collaborate with Albarn on projects including an elaborate staging of the Chinese novel Monkey: Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en, complete with circus acrobats, Shaolin monks, and Chinese singers. In 2006, he was named "Designer of the Year" by the Design Museum in London, and in 2009, Hewlett and Albarn won a BAFTA for their animated Monkey sequence for the Beijing Olympic Games. More recently, The Suggestionists, an exhibition of prints at the Saatchi Gallery in London, demonstrated an exciting new direction in Hewlett’s practice.
To learn more about the comic book artist and designer, and enjoy seeing his work, pick up a copy of Jamie Hewlett, published by TASCHEN.
All images courtesy of TASCHEN. Main image: Billy Fury, 2017. Album artwork for Gorillaz' Humanz | © Jamie Hewlett
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