Review:

"I don’t mind if people call these works silly," says the American artist William Anthony with a smile; he then adds that the works are, above all, satirical. An exhibition of his drawings and the works of the Danish artist Anne Bennike will open today at Gallery Kambi, the home gallery of artist Gunnar Arnar, in Holtum. EINAR FALUR INGÓLFSSON interviewed Anthony on the matter

The American artist William Anthony has spent the last four decades working with a distinctive artistic world: simple figurative drawings that are often ambiguous and present an ironic view of society, the art world, and history. His drawings have been published in magazines and exhibited in collections, and many of the leading museums in the United States own works by him.

"My drawings are satirical – that’s the word that describes them," says William. "Sometimes they are called cartoons; I don’t get upset about that, but I’m not entirely comfortable with it either. In cartoons and traditional caricatures, everything tends to be rather sweet, but my works are just bad drawings or bad paintings! If you look at the hands of the people, you’ll see that I absolutely can’t draw a hand. And I’m even worse at drawing faces. No, these are more satirical works than cartoons."

Anthony emerged on the scene with the wave of pop artists in the 1960s and spent some time teaching.

"In 1962, I was teaching young people at an art school, and the students wanted to learn to draw hands correctly, so they looked like real hands. I knew how to do that well, which is why I was the teacher. The kids kept making the same mistakes again and again. I gathered all their mistakes into a pile and created a figure, very similar to the ones seen in my works. I hung the drawing up; the kids laughed, and I think they learned a lot from it. I then started experimenting more with this figure, making it worse and worse – or better and better – and gradually realized that it offered certain possibilities in my own art. At that time, I was working in a completely different style, but within five years, this approach took over. Since then, it hasn’t changed much."

Anthony associates himself with an art movement he calls “funk,” within which many artists often explored humanity in society through their works.

"I had been making these kinds of images for a long time before the famous Philip Guston ventured into similar imagery," he says. "Guston joined the train late. But there were good contemporaries within this movement, like Westerman and, of course, Saul Steinberg."

Anthony has often worked with various themes, creating, for instance, images based on artworks, about his own encounters with people and events of the Second World War.

"Much of this comes from thoughts I had as a child when I was about ten years old. I was exactly ten when the war ended, and all the kids in America loved that war. Our fathers and brothers went to war but came back; compared to the European armies, there were very few casualties among the Americans. For us, it was just one big adventure. We were devastated when the war ended; we all wanted to go to the army. And, of course, we loved to hate the Germans and the Japanese."

Back then, one often thought about cowboys and Indians, and I still think about them in my drawings.

"I have also done quite a bit of work based on famous paintings. I often like to put a bit of a twist on them. There’s usually some humor in the situations I recreate.

I don’t mind if people call my works silly, but they are not malicious or cruel either."

The works of William Anthony and Danish artist Anne Bennike have been exhibited at Stalke Gallery in Copenhagen. Gunnar Arnar’s works are also regularly shown there, and through the gallery’s initiative, these two artists are now exhibiting their works at Gallery Kambi, located on the eponymous farm of Gunnar in Holtum.

"I am very pleased to exhibit here with Anne, as we are spiritually connected, despite the age difference" – he was born in 1934 and she in 1974 – "and we have made drawings together. I may have started by drawing parts of bodies, and then she would take over and add heads to them."

The exhibition opens at 3 PM today at Kambi, and at 5 PM, Anthony will present slides of his works and invite discussions about life and art.