Collage Archive | artistvenu

Heartbreaking Side-by-Side Photo Collages Reveal Stark Differences of Children Around the World

February 10, 2022 (updated February 11, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Istanbul-based artist Uğur Gallenkuş uses photo collages as a powerful way to showcase the differences in the world. Placing disparate photojournalism images side-by-side, he fuses them into singular compositions that highlight problems across the globe, with a focus on the Western world and the Middle East.

“These problems are war-conflicts, socio-economic problems, environmental disasters, women’s and children’s rights,” Gallenkuş tells My Modern Met. “All of the photos in my works are news photos of real events. Not all of us can understand the events we see in the news and the experiences of the people who have been exposed to these events.”

By placing photos next to each other, the contrasts remind us that there are other people out there who live totally different lives than us.

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Acts of Hope: World Collage Day 2022

February 5, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

1956 De Soto/Yellow Sky from the “Glitter Highways” series by Erin McCluskey Wheeler
12″x16″x.375″; vintage car ad and Acryla gouache on paper mounted on panel

Announcing the 2022 World Collage Day Poster Artist

The Renaissance was an amazing time, a profound leap forward in art, architecture, philosophy, literature, music, science…nearly all aspects of human endeavor. While the focus of that history is on Europe, the wealth and knowledge that made the Renaissance possible came from Asia, Africa, the Islamic World, and the Americas. One of the greatest gifts of that time was a philosophy of humanism and the belief in the agency and potential of human beings. A door to human liberation opened by Islamic philosopher Al-Jubba’i nearly five centuries earlier, humanism flourished during the Renaissance and the capacity to understand one’s own humanity expanded exponentially. The thing is, if you were living during that time, you didn’t know it was a Renaissance.

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Walking for Art

February 2, 2022 (updated February 2, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Mary Lum, “Poster” (2021), acrylic, found paper, and photo collage on paper, 30 x 22 inches

Mary Lum’s paintings on paper are based on collages, which are made from things she uses or encounters in her everyday life as well as photographs she takes of the places she visits. Looking at her works in the exhibition Mary Lum: When the Sky Is a Shape at Yancey Richardson (January 8–February 26, 2022), the writings of Michel de Certeau, particularly the essay “Walking in the City,” came to mind. In that essay (included in his 1984 book The Practice of Everyday Life), de Certeau makes the following comparison:

The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple “enunciative” function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting out of language); and it implies relations among the differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic “contracts” in the form of movements […]. It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.

Using de Certeau’s comparison as a guide, I think a lot may be gained by considering Lum’s works as visual enunciations based on walks she has taken, and the multiple associations each daily adventure can stir up.

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Clement Greenberg: Collage

January 27, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Georges Braque, Man with a Guitar, 1911

COLLAGE WAS A major turning point in the evolution of Cubism, and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of modernist art in this century. Who invented collage–Braque or Picasso–and when is still not settled. Both artists left most of the work they did between I907 and 1914 undated as well as unsigned; and each claims, or implies the claim, that his was the first collage of all. That Picasso dates his, in retrospect, almost a year earlier than Braque’s com-pounds the difficulty. Nor does the internal or stylistic evidence help enough, given that the interpretation of Cubism is still on a rudimentary level.

The question of priority is much less important, however, than that of the motives which first induced either artist to paste or glue a piece of extraneous material to the surface of a picture. About this, neither Braque nor Picasso has made him-self at all clear. The writers who have tried to explain their intentions for them speak, with a unanimity that is suspect in itself, of the need for renewed contact with “reality” in face of the growing abstractness of Analytical Cubism. But the term “reality,” always ambiguous when used in connection with art, has never been used more ambiguously than here. A piece of imitation-woodgrain wallpaper is not more “real” under any definition, or closer to nature, than a painted simulation of it; nor is wallpaper, oilcloth, newspaper or wood more “real,” or closer to nature, than paint on canvas. And even if these materials were more “real,” the question would still be begged, for “reality” would still explain next to nothing about the actual appearance of the Cubist collage.

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Merzzeichnung: Typology and Typography

January 27, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Kurt Schwitters
Aphorism 1923
Tate

When Kurt Schwitters began making collages in 1918, the initial term he used to describe them was Merzzeichnungen (Merz drawings). This article considers the place of drawing in the development of Schwitters’s Merz practice and argues that the close connection he made between drawings and collages was not merely because of their common status as works on paper. By analogizing collage and drawing, Schwitters gave new priority to the latter but not as immediate access to the artist’s thought. Rather, drawing was a medium that could meld together elements of painting, printmaking and writing, disrupting conventional artistic categories and demanding a greater role for the viewer in creative interpretation.

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Chaos, Complexity, & Collage

January 27, 2022 (updated February 25, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Beauty on Trial by Stephen M. Specht
collage. Courtesy of the artist.

Unpacking the Psychology of the Creative Process

“I have scores of vintage LIFE magazines in my chaotic (dictionary definitional use) studio, as well as dozens of vintage books, including books about steam engines, anatomy, photography, insects, and history,” writes Steven M. Specht, Ph.D. in Kolaj 34. “Of course, I also have many contemporary magazines and books from which to choose potential collage elements. Although all of these sources seem quite static as they sit stacked on the floor or on bookshelves; they create the potential for an extremely complex dynamical system. What may seem like a random act of selection of an element, perhaps is not random at all, but determined by a myriad of slight perturbations in ‘initial conditions’ of the artist and the environment. Artists sometimes refer to the role of ‘intuition’ in their creative process. In Simonton’s analysis, this may be the source of ‘blind variations’.

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Shipping containers collide with the environment in Mary Iverson’s mix media paintings

January 19, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

sunk 2
acrylic, ink, and found photograph on panel, 12 x 12 inches

MARY IVERSON DEPICTS THE CLASH BETWEEN GLOBALIZATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Seattle-based landscape painter, Mary Iverson, creates artworks that depict the clash between globalization and the environment. juxtaposing found photography with intersecting lines that result in shipping containers, the artist uses oil, acrylic and ink to offer a vision of post apocalyptic scenarios.

‘my paintings explore the balance between the environment and industrial activities, inspiring conversations about our complicated relationship with nature,’ reads the artist’s profile.

In her paintings, Mary Iverson portrays well-known scenarios that have been invaded by shipping containers. from the port of Seattle to pyramids in Cairo, her paintings inspire conversations about the causes and consequences of climate change.

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A Guide to Collage

January 17, 2022 (updated January 17, 2022) Published by artistvenu

MAPA HOLOGRÁFICO DE ROTA DE FUGA by Gustavo Amaral

Who invented collage?
The term collage was coined around 1910 by the two pioneers of the Cubist movement, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. While exploring their new pictorial language, which sorts to fragment and distort their subject matters, Braque and Picasso began to experiment with assorted materials, such as printed oilcloth, newspaper cut-outs and patterned paper. By pasting these elements onto flat surfaces, they were able to evoke multiple dimensionality and further explore the fragmentation and destruction of objects.

One of the very first examples of collage is Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). In this collage, Picasso incorporated painted elements, oilcloth printed with a chair caning pattern, and a piece of rope as a frame. Using these everyday items in a work of art signaled a dramatic move away from the traditional confinements of fine art practice, towards the blurring of art and everyday culture.

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