On the occasion of the publication of Requiem for Gaza, Galerie Martel is honoured to present in Brussels the gallery’s first monographic exhibition devoted to Joe Sacco, Time of Wars.
The exhibition brings together three major bodies of work centred on war, each reflecting a different visual and narrative language developed by Joe Sacco to represent, document and question conflict.
Through these three series, Time of Wars explores the different ways in which the artist has confronted the representation of war and its consequences throughout his career, moving between documentary investigation, historical narrative and satire.
The exhibition press release, which offers an introduction to Joe Sacco’s work and career, is written by Emmanuel Guibert.
PRESS RELEASE BY EMMANUEL GUIBERT - LINK TO PDF
Joe Sacco — Time of Wars
19 September — 31 October 2026
Galerie Martel, Brussels
In The Great War, Joe Sacco returns to a conflict that has haunted him since childhood. Raised in Australia, where the memory of the ANZAC landings at Gallipoli occupies a central place in the national narrative, he developed an early fascination with the First World War. After twenty years devoted to reportage and contemporary conflicts, from Palestine to Bosnia, Sacco chose in 2011 to confront this earlier history and what, in his own words, it continued to cast over his view of humanity.
The work focuses on a single day: July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme and one of the deadliest in the history of the British Army. Sacco reconstructs its unfolding in a vast, wordless frieze composed of twelve panels which, when fully extended, form a panorama nearly eight metres long.
In conceiving the composition, Sacco took the Bayeux Tapestry as his model. As in the medieval narrative, he deliberately dispenses with realistic perspective and proportion, allowing multiple places and moments to coexist within a single visual continuum. The eye moves across the front from left to right: soldiers advance towards the trenches, go over the top, are wounded and evacuated to the rear, while around them unfolds the entire material infrastructure of war.
This freedom in the representation of space contrasts with the extreme documentary precision of the drawing. Sacco undertook extensive research, notably in the photographic archives of the Imperial War Museum, in order to accurately reconstruct uniforms, weapons, field kitchens, ambulances, horses, and military installations. The drawing accumulates a multitude of gestures, bodies, and individual situations. As the viewer’s gaze lingers over the image, the anonymous mass of the army fragments into singular human experiences.
No dialogue or caption guides the reading of the work. Sacco deliberately relinquishes commentary: there is neither an indictment of the high command nor a celebration of sacrifice. From General Douglas Haig’s prayer to the soldiers’ graves, his primary concern is to show what lies between military decision-making and its human consequences.
Silence thus becomes one of the work’s essential principles. Deprived of the conventional progression of comics and of the reporter’s voice, the viewer must move slowly through the image, return to its details, and reconstruct the narrative independently. The Great War therefore extends Sacco’s documentary practice while shifting its terms: the investigation no longer unfolds through speech or testimony, but through the narrative power of drawing alone.
The complete set of 13 original drawings from The Great War is offered for sale as a whole, with priority given to institutional collections. Price on request.