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 Sacco of the 617 Squadron, published in Bumf Vol. 1, Joe Sacco temporarily steps away from the documentary mode that defines his major works on Palestine, Bosnia, and the First World War, returning instead to a more overtly satirical vein rooted in the tradition of underground comics.
In this five-page sequence, Sacco casts himself as an airman in the 617 Squadron, the Royal Air Force unit made famous during the Second World War. Sent on a mission to bomb Tehran, he is quickly brought back to his true status: not that of a military hero, but of a cartoonist thrust into the heart of the machinery of war.
This shift is characteristic of Sacco’s humour. The conventions of the war narrative — heroism, masculinity, obedience, patriotic rhetoric — are pushed to the point of absurdity and confronted with deliberately grotesque violence. Sacco collapses different periods, conflicts, and historical figures into one another: contemporary Iran sits alongside Imperial Germany, while war becomes a theatre in which the same mechanisms of domination and fantasies of power are repeatedly played out in different forms.
This satirical dimension runs throughout Bumf, a work in which Sacco casts a particularly corrosive eye over several decades of American foreign policy and the persistence of war in contemporary history. Here, his dense and teeming drawings move closer to political cartooning and caricature. Exaggeration, obscenity, and the burlesque do not diminish the violence; on the contrary, they expose its absurdity.
These five pages thus provide a counterpoint to the documentary works presented in the exhibition. Where The Great War and War on Gaza are grounded in investigation, observation, and the meticulous reconstruction of facts, Sacco of the 617 Squadron turns to fiction and satire. Two seemingly opposed modes, yet both emerge from the same underlying question: how can war, the narratives built around it, and the systems of power that make it possible be represented?