The cutting edge: contemporary art collage
Elliott Hundley
Soon after he first started working with collage, LA artist Elliott Hundley (b. 1975) had a startling realisation.
Using his mother's "very small" living room as a makeshift studio, it suddenly occurred to him that "the room was much more interesting than the actual piece of paper I was putting everything on."
This insight led to a literal expansion of his practice, with the artist abandoning flat surfaces for works that blur the lines between collage, sculpture and assemblage.
These sprawling structures expand into space (left), imposing yet fragile concoctions of bamboo, plastics and string combined with photographs, paintings and drawings.
Other, wall-based works at first appear flat, but consist of individual elements pinned, rather than pasted, into position to create complex topographies.
Recent examples of this dizzying take on the humble pin-board are particularly impressive, with large-scale works such as Pentheus, 2010 (details page top and below) featuring literally thousands of constituents.
Meticulously clipped images jostle for space along with beads, trimmings, tiny trinkets, fragments of text and various other repurposed leftovers. (Magnifying glasses are also helpfully embedded in order to appraise the wealth of detail).
Yet these extraordinary extremes of labour-intensivity are, in fact, merely the tip of the production iceberg, with Hundley also preparing much of his raw material in advance: photographing friends to capture specific gestures, for example, or making paintings and drawings for inclusion in a specific piece.
This aspect of his practice, combined with a relatively recent interest in Greek drama, accentuates a performative dimension which ultimately manifests as an intense theatricality, and which the wall reliefs in particular bring to the fore through a latent fluidity of narrative and composition.
Despite the almost infinite interconnections of association they already offer, each pinned fragment or player is potentially moveable, an entirely new production always inherent.
Kirstine Roepstorff
Berlin-based Danish artist Kirstine Roepstorff (b.1972) is not only known for beautifully crafted collages, but celebrated, too, for an expansive engagement with the medium which has continually sought to broaden its parameters.
Early works such as You Are Being Lied To (2002, above), employ commercial photomurals as ready-made backgrounds for dozens of clipped images augmented by sequins, beads and glitter.
These colourful, faintly kitsch panoramas were soon followed by greater emphasis on the possible components of collage; elaborate mixed-media confections in which the aforementioned sequins and glitter join forces with materials such as fabrics, glass, foil, tinsel and pearls.
Combined, to varying degrees, with newspaper clippings and photocopied images, many of these dizzying, though perfectly balanced, constellations of pattern, texture and colour appear to approach total abstraction (below).
This new accent on materials was accompanied by analogous revision of the traditional pictorial space occupied by collage.
Rejecting confinement to the flat, wall-mounted support, many of Roepstorff's works extrude into their surroundings, can be displayed as hangings, or exist as multi-part installations.
Most recently, the artist has begun to investigate sleekly sculptural forms (final image), kinetic pieces and ambitiously immersive audiovisual installation.
"Everything matters, even if it doesn't seem to", Roepstorff has stated, and the visual drama so evident in her practice is fused with earnest - if far less immediate - philosophical and political musings hinted at in the titles of her works, choice of imagery and content of the newspaper clippings incorporated into many pieces.
For Roepstorff, her use of collage expresses an ultimate desire "... to appropriate and rearrange the world"; an endeavour which the artist succinctly describes as 'appropriarranging'.
Charting territories confirmed or upheld by the assault of visual information with which we are bombarded, Roepstorff interrogates the role of image in constructing, compounding or reflecting the world's realities - and attempts to formulate new ones of her own.
David Thorpe
UK artist David Thorpe made his name in the mid 1990s with finely detailed paper collages of London high-rise estates allocated dreamily bucolic settings (above).
These impressive examples of paper-cutting were quickly superceded by works of even greater complexity; virtuoso mixed-media collages in which hundreds of tiny fragments mimic the appearance of paintings or finely detailed prints (below, left).
Depicting visionary structures and landscapes of the artist's own devising, they characterise a constant theme in Thorpe's work, which he describes as "slightly New Age, slightly Space Age, slightly threatening ... I'm absolutely in love with people who build up their own systems of belief."
Notably, too, Thorpe distances himself from collaging methods inspired by modernism, instead adopting pre-20th century techniques such as the paper-cutting and découpage popular during the 18th century and 19th centuries, in which emphasis is placed on a painstaking mimicking of nature.
For Thorpe, the labour-intensivity and hard-earned skills evident in carefully crafted objects - particularly those with an ultimately utilitarian function - are an essential aspect of artistic endeavour.
Closely aligned with the artisanal, it's an ethos which, while partially identifiable in the meticulous hands-on production of much recent contemporary art, veers considerably from a notion of self-enclosed, autonomous creative expression.
Consequently, while recent works by Thorpe continue to explore forms of collage by incorporating materials as diverse as leather, slate, formica, glass, dried grasses and flowers (left), they clearly reference his interest in socially engaged artist-makers such as William Morris, leader of the English Arts and Crafts movement (left and below).
Elements of sculpture, architecture and domestic design are now even more integral to his work, extending the engagement with utopian vision and reformist zeal always apparent in Thorpe's contemporary twists on distinctly less modern values.
Hilary Pecis
San Francisco-based Hilary Pecis has garnered considerable attention for elaborate collaged 'landscapes' bristling with imagery culled from glossy magazines or the internet.
Many of these works also include hand-drawn motifs - intricate, black and white "rock formations" produced using a personal system of codification (above and left).
Recently, Pecis has moved from analogue to digital production (below), a decision which, interestingly, she believes has resulted in more concentrated focus on the works themselves: "... people were much more impressed with the cutting and pasting of actual material and the implied time that they took to make. That was definitely not what I wanted the viewer to think about when they saw the landscapes."
The transition has also led to growing focus on digital techniques and environments themselves, through works that clearly acknowledge the use of mergeable layers in software such as Photoshop, as well as the preeminence - and peculiarities - of online image distribution.
Having searched Google for the 'perfect sunset', for example, Pecis gathered and blended the top 100 image results to create the aptly named 100 Perfect sunsets (above), a wry meditation on logical impossibility and the paradoxes inherent in the categorisation and consumption of digital media.
A similarly shrewd approach to the super-abundance of online imagery informs Better than a Double Rainbow (below).
An interesting adjunct to Pecis' established practice, for us, at least, the witty conceptual enquiry underpinning these latest works proves more appetising than her (admittedly luscious) fictional landscapes.
A promising change in direction that offers food for thought, as well as eye candy.
Thomas Hirschhorn
For Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn (b. 1957) the act of art making is inextricably linked to a social and moral imperative, his practice characterised by concerted, often grimly forthright assaults on political injustice, the realties of war, violence and poverty, and structures of consumerist control such as advertising.
Although Hirschhorn is perhaps most often associated with sprawling, chaotic environments comprised of cheap, everyday materials, his early collage works - or Einzelarbeiten - provide a logical precursor to the later installative practice which he has frequently referred to as "collages in the third dimension".
Combining imagery sourced from magazines or the internet with tape, cardboard, paint, biro and marker pen, these powerful works rail against the many iniquities and social injustices the artist feels compelled to highlight.
Hirschhorn has stated that his objective when creating these collages was to produce "... a simple, easy and evident work. I wanted to do a basic, rough, primitive work. I wanted to do crude collages."
Intentionally abject and unpolished, the immediacy and urgency of these works is augmented by acts of scribbling, defacement and hand-written textual commentary.
Two-dimensional collage remains an important medium for Hirschhorn, and recent works adopt an uncharacteristic simplicity to make some of his most contentious, hard-hitting statements (below).
Juxtaposing material cropped from fashion glossies with 'mirror' images of the mutilated victims of Middle Eastern conflict, these harrowing, yet courageous, documents express the horrors of war against a backdrop of incessant incitement to consumption.
In Hirschhorn's own words, "...I want to create the condition for an Understanding of the World – the World I am living in.... Doing Collages means creating a New World with elements of the Existing World.
Doing Collages is expressing the Agreement with the Existing World without approving it. This is Resistance."
Dash Snow
Polemicism regarding Dash Snow's contribution to 21st century art was rife during his tragically short career, and no doubt will remain so for some time to come.
Hailed by many as a truly authentic voice - a radical, if wayward, creative spirit - others found his work insubstantial, its deficiencies masked by the hype surrounding the artist's heavily-scrutinised persona.
It certainly seems true that Snow himself was initially reluctant to view himself as a serious artist,only persuaded to show his production of polaroids, collages and installation fter repeated entreaties from friends such as Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley.
Our opinion leans towards recognising the importance of Snow's brief output, and although never uniformly impressed by his practice, certainly feel that his collages merit inclusion here.
Energetic, irreverent and often surprisingly witty, they recapture something of the sloganeering, kick-ass essence of Dadaist collage while also revealing a multi-faceted personality seemingly torn between reflection and reaction.
Indeed, many of Snow's more delicate compositions belie his tearaway reputation (despite a consistent, rather de rigeur grubbiness) by hinting at a deep vulnerability.
The column of precariously balanced cut-out figures rising across adjoined sheets of yellowing paper, for example (left), is forever poised on the edge of almost certain collapse.
In other works, Snow's anti-establishment stance comes more obviously to the fore.
His well-known practice of splattering tabloid pages with semen (often embellished with a sprinkling of glitter) inevitably proved controversial, particularly since images of authority figures were frequent recipients of this indisputably powerful mark of contempt.
Nevertheless, this novel interpretation of the front-page splash was complicated by similar treatment of middle eastern terrorists (left) - an act presumably as appealing to swathes of middle America as the rest of the artist's work was anathema.
Dash Snow was never, by most accounts, entirely seduced by the allure of the art scene, and although said to have rejected the support of his fabulously wealthy family, was probably never financially dependent on commercial success.
The sense that he simply didn't care enough about the intrinsic value of the work he produced can certainly be levelled as a criticism, but also allowed him to work with an unshackled, frequently rather brilliant freedom.
Jacob Hashimoto
Poised (beautifully) between collage, handicraft and sculpture, works by US artist Jacob Hashimoto (b. 1973) are constructed of dozens of hand-made components fashioned in the manner of Japanese kites.
Rice-paper or silk is cut into geometric forms which are then attached to delicate bamboo frameworks.
Individually decorated with collage elements (detail, left), they are then strung in layers between opposing rows of wooden pegs to create rich abstractions principally suggested, according to Hashimoto, by landscape.
Further sources of inspiration, besides obvious references to the artist's Japanese heritage, range from "...early emphasis on grid-based abstraction and minimalism to more painterly works that ... reference everything from board games to Peter Halley to Murakami to Marden to Buckminster Fuller to Bridget Riley (and) Maya Lin...."
Hashimoto's practice pushes at the precepts of collage by incorporating individual elements within a formal structure that is neither fully fixed nor entirely mobile; each tiny 'kite' is free to flutter slightly around the axis of its string.
The artist describes his work as "... oscillate(ing) between small individual collaged compositions and visually spacious overall compositions", but the temptation to regard it as collage withincollage extends definition of the medium beyond its French etymology (from the verb 'coller', to paste or glue) into less rigid realms of execution.
Some of Hashimoto's most recent works expand his characteristic materials further into space to produce enveloping, ethereal installation (below).
With artists such as David Thorpe, Kristine Roepstorff and Thomas Hirschhorn all envisaging collage as hybrid or installative structures, and the stratified, pinned wall reliefs of Eliot Hundley equally liberating the medium from its traditional cut and paste production, collage is increasingly associated with a new freedom that Hashimoto's practice both taps into, and promotes.
Jelle Martens
The coolly precise graphics of young Belgian designer Jelle Martens pair the influence of spare Flemish modernism with early 60's design; an aesthetic which, in slightly more flamboyant form, defines his striking 2009 photomontage series In The Quivering Forest (below, left).
Coupling geometric composition with multiple photographic viewpoints, the works successfully convey a sense of movement, spaciousness and freedom within a rigorously defined structure - a perfectly resolved tension between fluidity and constraint which characterises Martens' work in general.
A slightly later series, aptly named Puur, plays neatly with the very nature of collage by superimposing two similar images, then segmenting the entire composition with fine lines (below).
Initially appearing to mark a division between different source materials, perception of the line as boundary momentarily impedes recognition of the 'real', circular cut-up at the heart of the composition.
Delighting not only in elegantly persuasive design but fascinated, too, by the perceptual and visual conceits which inform the work of many recent artists, Martens' cleverly constructed collages forge a convincing path between graphic design and the wider concerns of fine art.
John Stezaker
Although UK artist John Stezaker (b. 1949) has produced his distinctive collages since the 1970s, widespread recognition of his work is relatively recent, his practice 'rediscovered' by the art market and collectors in the mid 2000s.
Stezaker's distinctive approach to collage is founded on what he describes as "a series of processes of disjunction. First .... finding the image, then various devices to estrange or 'abuse' it..."
These interventions range from actions as simple as turning an image upside down, to complex interweaving of several pictorial sources; many of his most celebrated works, however, feature a combination of just two images.
In Stezaker's work, too, the act of layering and cutting takes on an unusually considered, eloquent role.
Rejecting the approach to collage whereby specific elements are clipped entirely from their surroundings, Stezaker has stated that "I don't like ... detachment from the original. That's my problem with any process; I am fascinated with the original."
Accordingly, he either avoids destructive intervention by juxtaposing complete images to generate extraordinary instances of visual play (above left) or, in cases where cutting is required to initiate the states of 'estrangement' he seeks, rarely crops beyond a point at which original form and content become entirely obscured.
This constant movement between the sustained 'semi-presence' of Stezaker's base materials and their cumulative rendition of entirely new readings - a process amounting to the fluctuations of perceptual gestalt - lies at the heart of what makes Stezaker's practice so fascinating - and, indeed, influential, with echoes of his work increasingly noticeable among younger artists.
Whether grafting two photographic portraits into an uncanny new visage, exploring fortuitous synchronicities of alignment or instigating bizarrely hermaphroditic identities, Stezaker's keen eye for resonance unwaveringly converts the commonplace into the uncanny, allowing, as he puts it, "... an image to become an imaginary possibility."
Ion Barladeanu
We've already dedicated an article elsewhere to the extraordinary story of this once entirely unknown Romanian artist, but suffice it to say here that Barladeanu has been touted (with some justification) as one of the most important of recent outsider talents.
For many years a homeless alcoholic, Barladeanu spent much of his time creating hundreds of collages with images salvaged from discarded magazines.
Dangerously critical of former president Nicolae Ceausescu and his regime, the works were secreted away until a chance encounter between Barladeanu and a young artist brought the material to light - and earned Barladeanu unimagined success as the toast of the Bucharest art world and beyond.
This unlikely art star's rags to riches tale fired the imagination of the Romanian public, spawning a Romanian TV documentary which was later released as a film on the art cinema circuit. And although, as the movie makes clear, the transition from down and out to celebrity has not been smooth, Barladeanu's inclusion in Romania's story of recent art looks certain.
Javier Rodriguez
Aiming to highlight the "fragile and transient aspects of human existence", London-based Venezuelan artist Javier Rodriguez (b.1975) frequently utilises materials with a distinctly antique aesthetic: 18th and 19th century engravings, printed ephemera, or period reproductions of classic paintings.
Among the most striking of his works, the reconstituted portraits and figure studies shown here appear to shift between mediums, identities and temporalities, resulting in images that are compellingly spectral and uncertain in nature.
Emulating historic portraiture, a void surrounds each subject, the (literal) absence of background detail providing a space onto which our own imaginings can be projected.
Rodriguez's figures are inscrutable collaged identities: fractured, veiled, or partially incorporeal, their phantasmagorical essence threatens to mutate further into darkness.
This indeterminacy is echoed not only by the collage medium and its amalgamation of disparate sources, but also by Rodriguez's chosen materials.
Often printed facsimiles of paintings, they are copies of the past, from the past; transpositions of one medium to another.
The processes of fracture, slippage and redefinition inherent in the endless recirculation of art and image equally apply to the retelling of history.
Rodriguez's impossible portraits personify the ultimate unknowability of the distant past through composite ghosts of the lives that populated it.
Godfried Donkor
In the series of Black Madonnas(left) by London-based Ghanian Godfried Donkor (b. 1964), Trinidadian glamour models emerge like resplendent deities from the holds of finely engraved ships.
It's easy to view the scene as a fantastical set-piece - a take, perhaps, on the famously exuberant revels of the Trinidad Carnival - until it becomes clear that the vessels depicted are slave ships, built for the purpose of ferrying human cargo across the seas.
Set against a backdrop of pages from the Financial Times, Donkor's disarmingly simple compositions become sombre meditations driven by themes of commerce and trade.
Clearly referencing the slave trade itself, a barbaric but lucrative industry providing forced labour for further highly profitable ventures, the exact role of Donkor's madonnas is far more ambiguous.
On the one hand symbolic of the rich multiculturalism colonisation would eventually yield, their presence is complicated by connection with the (rather unsaintly) glamour industry.
Perpetuating women's particular thrall to perceptions of nubility and beauty as their most precious assets, the modelling, beauty and fashion industries can easily be construed as yet another form of enslavement.
This concern with notions of profit, loss and deictic shifts in the word 'trade' underpins much of Donkor's work, probing a vocabulary couched in the cold rationality of economics for moral metaphor and its historic relationship with colonialism, slavery and the cultural ramifications of both.
His series of carefully chosen world flags, for example, are again constructed from collaged copies of the Financial Times, depriving each of its specific colours and emphasising the centrality of economics to national interests (article top).
Accompanied by a Jolly Roger, the infamous emblem of piracy contrasts strikingly with the assumed integrity of statehood, serving, too, as a reminder of the true nature of much of the legitimised maritime commerce disrupted by 'lawless' pirate activity.
This not only included the shipping of slaves discussed above, but extended to plunder, pillage and transportation of colonial resources, many of which, such as cotton or sugar, also depended on slave labour for their production.
Donkor is equally fascinated by sports - particularly boxing which, in England, took on unique characteristics echoing many of the issues explored in the artist's work.
Hugely popular during much of the 18th century and 19th centuries, boxing was practised across social classes: a 'gentlemanly sport' taught at the great public schools (Lord Byron, in particular, was well-known for his enthusiasm, a fact Donkor has alluded to) yet was equally popular among England's workers.
Historically represented by various ethnicities (above, left), success at prize-fighting offered a gateway to fame, fortune and superior social standing, despite prevailing restrictions of class, birth and race.
For Donkor, the history of pugilism provides a more accurate reflection of early British multiculturalism - particularly the relatively pronounced presence of African and Caribbean peoples - than is widely known or represented.
And as a sport in which 'trading blows' forms the basis of a rare meritocracy (for men, at least), boxing stands in stark contrast to the other economies and trades Donkor reflects upon.
This fragile equality would become a distinctive feature of sport in the US, where, despite endemic racism well into the 20th century, many black sportsmen (and, more rarely, women, who also had to contend with gender prejudice) made an enduring impact on their chosen disciplines.
Mark Bradford
Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford's well-known collage works use printed ephemera to create abstract-seeming compositions that often resemble mapped cities.
The likeness is not coincidental: Bradford's materials, such as advertisements, stickers and pasted posters, are gathered from LA neighbourhoods then reassembled, burnished, scraped and sanded to create mesmerising, large-scale wall works (detail, below left).
While painterly in appearance, each piece retains traces of the "information in the city" from which it originates.
Bradford's process is thus cyclical as well as transformative: incorporating records of popular culture which are then layered and eroded in a studio rather than on the streets themselves, his collages become 'high art' exhibited on gallery walls.
"... Tracing the ghost of cities past", Bradford's practice is as much about innate documentation as the pure abstractions he appears to emulate.
Liu Shi Tung
Well-known in his homeland, Taiwanese artist Liu Shi Tung (b.1970) has been described as "...one of the first major artists in the wave of 'playful art' that emerged in Taiwan at the beginning of the new century."
Adopting collage as a logical extension of the Chinese folk art of paper cutting, Liu Shi Tung combines the medium with Far Eastern iconography - particularly the theme of the garden - to create delicately nuanced cultural hybrids.
Best of the rest: miscellaneous collage works
Tal R
Collage in styles ranging from simple to hugely complex play a major role in this Berlin-based, Danish-Israeli artist's practice (b. 1967).
Olaf Breuning
Swiss-born artist Olaf Breuning (b. 1970) lives and works in New York
Ryan Gander
London-based UK artist Ryan Gander (b. 1976) is known for elaborately conceived works with a drily witty edge.
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