ARTISTS TALKING

Adam Dant's traditional-looking comic strips don't at first look hip, but he is an international star. He won the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2002 for his Anecdotal Plan of Tate Britain, 2001, and recently had his second show at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York. This exhibition, his first solo show in Britain also seen in a less extensive version at the new Drawing Room Gallery in Hackney includes work dating back to 1996 as well as the series The People Who Live on the Plank.

What gives Dant's comic strips their avant-garde status is his approach to narrative. "It's all TOO BIG to take on" is a motto the artist has used and, as the Mead show demonstrates, the more recent works depart further from the notion of the sequential strip. The series of eight foot drawings The People Who Live on the Plank, for example, is made up of many scenes in roundels. Miniature scenes in roundels suggest medieval sequences; the seasons of the year; emblematic cosmological diagrams; narratives with closure. Here, as in all Dant's work, incidents are related but don't have obvious continuity and, as the series unfolds, the roundels diminish in size suggesting an increase in complexity rather than movement towards closure.

Another recent work, Import Export, again made up of discrete anecdotes, connects Lagos and London and is based on interviews also suggesting a wish on Dant's part to present the real, even if that causes the work's meaning to overflow any narrative containment. Of course, in spite of the refusal to be pinned down, Dant's drawing can still be political – his debunking of English social mores in the spirit of Hogarth and of art dogma (in his ironic Bureau for the Investigation of the Subliminal Image) is entirely commensurate with his deconstructive approach to narrative.