By Keren Goldberg.
In recent years, it seems that collage has gained some renewed attention. In 2014, Whitechapel Gallery dedicated a retrospective to Hannah Höch’s politically critical collages. At the same time, Richard Hamilton’s retrospective filled Tate Modern with the daddy of Brit pop’s various collages, only to be replaced by a different blockbuster show – Henri Matisse’s Cuts-Outs, which later travel to MoMA New York. An exhibition of early collages by the American artist Robert Motherwell was on view at the Guggenheim two years ago, and in 2015 Hayward Gallery held a touring exhibition called ‘Pre-Pop to Post-Human: Collage in the Digital Age’, with artists creating prints using familiar iconography from video games, high street advertising, and popular magazines as a response to Eduardo Paolozzi’s collages from the 1950-60s. And Kurt Schwitters, who is known for his collages and assemblage pieces, was the subject of a long overdue retrospective at Tate Britain in London three years ago.
This new interest in the medium of collage is not coincidental. Today, many young artists are adopting techniques and aesthetics that draw on this medium
(The image in this post is Evian Disease [still], copyright of the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London)
