The Ends of Collage: New York

About

In New York the exhibition is dedicated to some of the technical preconditions of collage (variety of cuts, masks and windows, image manipulations and the notion of ‘edge’). In London, the exhibition shifts the focus towards some of the major themes that characterise the medium (fantasy, the domestic sphere, dismemberment of the social or private body, and the mobility of images). The third platform takes place on the pages of a printed publication, edited by Yuval Etgar, the curator of the exhibition, which brings together various theoretical motivations that precipitated the emergence of collage at the beginning of the twentieth century along with those that expanded the medium beyond its traditional limits with the emergence of digital cultures in the late 1970s.

The title chosen for the exhibition, The Ends of Collage, refers both literally and metaphorically to the place where collage fulfils its calling — at the ends or edges of pictures and fragments, where separate worlds come together or break apart from one another. But it also suggests an historical paradigm, where collage is considered as a medium that existed in the so called ‘age of mechanical reproduction’ and has now been overcome by the new logic of the digital age. 

The curator Yuval Etgar, a doctoral candidate in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art, Uniersity of Oxford, states:

“In a time where the term ‘cut and paste’ refers more often to allegorical and digital operations than to the use of scissors and glue, it seems imperative to go back and examine the technical invention that lies on the historical seam between pictures and images, between manual craft and the mediated reality of our time.” 

Featuring

Jean (Hans) Arp | Giacomo Balla | Marcel Duchamp | Max Ernst | Mark Flood | Jack Goldstein | Ellsworth Kelly | Lee Krasner | Louise Lawler | Sherrie Levine | Linder | René Magritte |  Pablo Picasso | Richard Prince | Cindy Sherman | John Stezaker