Lisa HANAWALT Beastalia

The Huberty & Breyne gallery, PARIS I Chapon – 21, is delighted to be showing “Beastalia”, France’s first solo exhibition of the work of Lisa Hanawalt, which is due to run from 21  November to 13 December 2025.

After graduating with a BA in art from UCLA in 2006, Lisa Hanawalt began drawing and writing short stories, publishing her own fanzines inspired by the comics of Phoebe  Gloeckner. Her graphic universe was soon populated by animals sporting all manner of absurd headgear – a pretext for drawing a tin of sardines, a pile of intestines, a pair of sneakers, or some other quirky element of everyday life.  Everything was grist to the Hanawalt mill: drawing, for Lisa Hanawalt, was like an endlessly flexible language in which she could combine a naïve approach with detailed realism, an economy of line with visual abundance, in one and the same double-page spread. Pizza Island, the cartoon studio space she shared with Kate Beaton, Sarah Glidden, Domitille Collardey and others, provided the location for an all-female creative endeavour. Like Claire Bretécher and Aline Crumb before her, Lisa Hanawalt was inspired by conversations with her fellow female cartoonists to produce unvarnished stories and illustrations that proved women too can be crude, even “disgusting”, and a little bit crazy. I’m a grown-up who loves to jump in the mud with both feet, she says wryly. Toilet humour, absurd lists, grungy comic strips … Lisa Hanawalt draws on even the most banal elements of everyday life and skews them with her own brand of absurd, caustic humour.

This exhibition brings together a collection of preparatory sketches for Hanawalt’s Tuca & Bertie series, short stories, drawings and illustrations taken from her “polygraphic” books My Dirty Dumb Eyes, Hot Dog Taste Test and I Want You, and original pages from Coyote Doggirl. The result is a kind of cabinet of curiosities of the absurd, in which we encounter the various styles, formats and techniques used by Lisa Hanawalt to disrupt artistic conventions, demolish artistic boundaries and explore, with complete freedom, drawing’s labyrinthine potential.

PRIVATE VIEW
Thursday 20 November 2025 
at 6.00 p.m.
in the presence of the artist
 
EXHIBITION
From Friday 21 November
to Saturday 13 December 2025

PARIS | Chapon - 21
21 rue Chapon 75003 Paris
Wednesday > Friday 13:30 a.m - 07:00 p.m
Saturday 12:00 a.m - 07:00 p.m