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
With War on Gaza, awarded the 2025 Eisner Award for Best Single Issue/One-Shot, Joe Sacco returns to a territory that has occupied a central place in his work for more than thirty years. Following Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, both grounded in investigation, testimony, and extensive fieldwork, Sacco adopts a radically different approach: for the first time, he draws a conflict as it unfolds.
Following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the Israeli offensive on Gaza, Sacco began publishing a series of graphic commentaries in The Comics Journal in January 2024. He steps away from the distance of the reporter to embrace a more personal, direct, and openly political voice. He places himself within the work, confronting the events, his own contradictions, and his sense of powerlessness.
Drawing thus becomes a space for reaction and confrontation. Sacco combines scenes of war with memories, historical references, political caricature, and dark humour. His dense linework, usually employed to meticulously reconstruct the testimonies and places he observes, becomes more incisive here. Political leaders appear alongside victims and Sacco himself, in a succession of images in which the personal and the political constantly intersect.
This intervention nevertheless remains firmly rooted in the continuity of his work on Palestine. Sacco never treats the present as an isolated event: he situates it within a history he has been documenting since his first stays in the Palestinian territories in the early 1990s. Unlike his previous investigations, however, War on Gaza seeks neither to establish an exhaustive historical account nor to propose a resolution to the conflict. Drawing becomes a means of bearing witness from a distance and, above all, of refusing silence.
The series was presented at Galerie Martel in Paris during the winter of 2025–2026 as part of Never Again!.. And Again… And Again…, an exhibition bringing together Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman. On that occasion, sales of the works raised more than €80,000 for UNICEF, which provides humanitarian assistance to children and families, including in the Palestinian territory.
Presented here alongside The Great War and Sacco of the 617 Squadron, these pages reveal a third way in which Sacco represents war. Alongside the documentary reconstruction of history and satirical subversion, we encounter graphic commentary produced in the urgency of the present. Three distinct visual languages that interrogate the same reality: the violence of war, the narratives that surround it, and the responsibility of those who bear witness to it.