He becomes even more direct in My 70 year old D(e)ad (2018), dedicated to his father who passed away. In A ritual in the cemetery, to let things go (2018), we see Antal in the middle of a deeply personal moment, scattering what might be flower petals, snow, or soil over the grave of a man. Beneath the portrait, the artist has scrawled the words: “You used to drive me crazy, but now I don’t feel anything.” Loss and death are also processed through the collages. In Love – so many times explaining the same same thing (2018), we see a portrait of a screaming man, the top of his head opening up to reveal red smoke escaping. In his collage Pain Thing (2019), the artist depicts himself in agony – three heads and three oesophagi lead down into a stomach that is burning bright red.

Moments of shame, pain, frustration or utter simplicity are depicted just as often as moments of beauty and success in the artist’s everyday life. This results in an incredibly diverse range of topics and themes, at times revealing the artist’s most intimate and emotional moments, at other times presenting seemingly banal situations or bizarre everyday experiences. In 2017, he started the daily art project “Visual Diaries.” Every day, Antal makes one collage, narrating a single event in that day. The focus of his artistic practice lies with the collage medium. The first of our selection of collage artists, Laslo Antal is a Hungarian artist from Serbia who is based in Berlin. “I am interested in preserving the memory of the first, ‘raw version’ of an event, before the process of memory takes over and reshapes, even deforms the actual event over the years.” Laslo Antal Yet the collages started taking on a life of their own, and Rosenquist eventually presented them as powerful standalone artworks. American Pop Artist James Rosenquist, for example, started out by making collages which were studies for his large-scale paintings. This strange understanding of collage is easily dismantled when taking a look at the rich, creative and ground-breaking history of collage. Rather than considering collage as a pure art form in and of itself, people tend to see it as a step on the way to something else. Finally, people often consider collage to be lesser than other art forms, viewing it as a second cousin to painting and sculpting.

Collage artists like Bradford show us this is not the case, as well as David Salle, whose painting in the ‘80s was absolutely guided by a “collage-type-thinking” inspired by film montage. This brings us to the second common misconception, that collage never encompasses painting. Yet take an artist like Mark Bradford: he defies this notion with his impressive, large-scale works combining standard paints and collage. In a conversation with collage specialist Pavel Zoubok, we reflected on the common misconceptions that have been following collage art around for a long time.įor one, collage is often considered as intimate, scaled work. Contemporary collage artists continue to work with the medium in ways that offer us new notions of what it can be and how it reflects on the world around us. Since then, collage artists from countless different movements, from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, have been exploring the technique. Cutting, ripping, pasting, overlaying different textures and materials, the two artists started examining and dissecting objects and life in a radically new way. The first examples of collage art were made over 100 years ago, when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, at the height of their artistic exchanges, burst into completely new territory with their avant-garde papiers collés.

Africa shape collage