At Ki Smith Gallery: Devo Frontman Mark Mothersbaugh’s Radiant Screenprints

Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh holds one of the prints from Postcard Superheroes and other Contemplations. Photo by J. Scott Orr

In 1978, while Devo was tangled in a lawsuit with Warner Brothers and holed up on Richard Branson's Thames houseboat, the band’s frontman, Mark Mothersbaugh, was making tiny collages. Japanese superhero tattoo transfers, real postage stamps, newspaper clippings from London—all of it crammed onto 3.5-by-5-inch cards. Nobody called it art. Mothersbaugh preferred it that way.

“I consider myself a contemporary social scientist,” Mothersbaugh said. “At least, that was the term we came up with when we were starting Devo back in the early ’70s to avoid the moniker 'artist,' though of course, we were. We wanted to distinguish ourselves from much of what passed for ‘art’ at the time, which didn’t resonate with us,” he said.

That spirit of principled avoidance runs through Postcard Superheroes and Other Contemplations, now open at Ki Smith Gallery on the Lower East Side. Those tiny collages Mothersbaugh began assembling nearly 50 years ago would eventually become the show's centerpiece, the Postcard Superheroes series.

A viewer considers the six Mark Mothersbaugh prints at Ki Smith gallery. Photo by J. Scott Orr

“These were hand pulled by Mark in 1985 in LA, and there are only a handful of them left,” said gallerist Ki Smith. “They showed once in Chelsea in 1987. And they haven't shown in New York since.”

“Mark would be doing these pieces when he was back in LA, taking breaks from touring with Devo. He would kind of use this as his release, to go into the silk screen studio he was working with and make these prints and hang out there to sort of get away,” Smith said.

It would be seven years after he created the six original cards that Mothersbaugh took them to Richard Duardo's studio Modern Multiples—then operating in what was a factory warehouse district in downtown LA, long before any arts district existed—and blew them up into large-scale hand-pulled screenprints. 

“I fell in love with printmaking in my first year at Kent State University, back in 1968,” Mothersbaugh said. “I printed for almost a decade before touring with Devo made it nearly impossible, but I reignited that love in the mid-’80s when I met Richard Duardo. Whenever I had free time, I would head over there to print my art, eventually building a large body of work, including the silkscreen prints in this current show."

Two of Mark Mothersbaugh’s prints under normal light and black light. Photo by J. Scott Orr

The prints are much more than they appear at first glance. In normal light they read one way. Turn off the lights and a phosphorescent image emerges that was invisible before. Then, under black light, a third image surfaces entirely. Each print carries its own concealed narrative, layered in ink the way Mothersbaugh has always layered meaning: sideways, with a smirk.

The prints have aged quite well over the decades, and when the black light gets switched on, the dayglow effect remains effervescent. Smith noted that the dayglow ink used in creating the prints has since been banned, so they can never be reproduced in the same way.

In one print, advancing soldiers in full Spartan regalia—spears leveled, chariots rolling—occupy the center, surrounded and outgunned by the Japanese fighter: Ancient warfare colliding with Cold War-era comic book firepower, all of it signed "MOTHERSBAUGH" right in the composition as if to claim the battlefield. Again, Mothersbaugh's commitment to time and place is liberal, to say the least, as violence from civilizations separated by centuries is presented with the same flat graphic energy. All of the prints reward the kind of slow looking that pop imagery usually discourages.

The prints have toured museums internationally. Mothersbaugh once held over 100 sets from his personal stash, but a new employee accidentally destroyed roughly half of them—a loss he openly mourns. Some of what survives arrives at Ki Smith with serious provenance.

Mark Mothersbaugh’s Postcard Superheroes and Other Contemplations is open now at Ki Smith Gallery, 170 Forsyth Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.