Pre-Pop To Post-Human: Collage In The Digital Age

About

In 1952, Eduardo Paolozzi gave a groundbreaking presentation at the ICA, London, which used images collected and collaged from popular magazines. ‘BUNK’ (derived from Henry Ford’s famous declaration ‘History is bunk!’) heralded the beginning of what became Pop Art. 

Taking these pre-Pop collages as a departure point this exhibition includes new prints by contemporary artists for whom the activity of digital manipulation, today’s equivalent of collage, has become second nature.

‘Pre-Pop to Post-Human: Collage in the Digital Age’ is an exhibition of 37 newly commissioned prints by fifteen young artists, shown alongside a selection of sixteen lithographs and screenprints from Paolozzi’s portfolio ‘BUNK’, created in 1972 from the original collages.

For ‘BUNK’, Paolozzi cut and pasted images from glossy magazines of curvaceous pin-ups alongside new robotics, high-tech prostheses, and wartime ammunition. Today, new technologies and the Internet have radically changed the ways in which artists can work, allowing images from popular culture to be seamlessly appropriated, mixed and layered in infinite combinations. Inspired by Paolozzi’s seminal collages, the artists in this exhibition create their own visions of the contemporary human condition in visually compelling and provocative images.

Using familiar iconography from video games, high street advertising slogans and popular magazines, these prints capture the fluidity of digital manipulation in various ways to create otherworldly landscapes, strange textures and surreal forms.

Artists include:
Pio Abad, Marie Angeletti, Helen Carmel Benigson, Gabriele Beveridge, Steve Bishop, Bryan Dooley, Adham Faramawy, Anthea Hamilton, Nicholas Hatfull, Eloise Hawser, Jack Lavender, Harry Meadows, Berry Patten, Peles Empire, Samara Scott