Everything falls faster than an anvil is an exhibition looking at unconscious and the influence of the popular cartoon in contemporary art. It includes a number of historical works that underpin a selection of artists working today who employ cartoon/comic rhetoric to investigate figurative painting and sculpture in a scene that is largely dominated by abstraction.

Taken from O’Donnells Laws of Cartoon Motion1, the exhibition title describes how, in ‘cartoon physics’, a falling anvil will always land directly upon a character’s head, regardless of the time gap between the body and anvil’s respective drops. Utilising this suspension of natural law, which the cartoon medium allows, as well as comic tropes of parody, juxtaposition, enlargement of scale, inversion of physical properties and/or the appropriation of cartoon aesthetics/symbolism, these artists operate under the veneer of popular culture to explore private meanings, the unconscious and darker social issues - as well as reflecting, with wit, on the nature of their chosen medium.

Both Claes Oldenburg and Paul Thek were included in an exhibition titled Beyond Realism, presented by critic Michael Kirby, which took place at Pace Gallery, New York in 1965 and explored similar themes. In the accompanying catalogue essay, Kirby described the works in Beyond Realism as “banal objects... things that we experience as directly as the things of everyday life. But their presence is not the everyday, rational one. It is the presence of the unconscious.”2 Everything falls faster than an anvil expands this reading to look at contemporaries from this period, as well as artists working today; who take the things of everyday life, the clichés of popular culture, and twist them into the other-worldly. A catalogue for the exhibition is forthcoming and will include an introduction by Dave Hickey.