collage

The dadaists further developed the collage technique recently discovered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques in Paris. Like the cubists, the dadaists pasted papers, fabric and other two-dimensional materials to their works, breaking down the barrier between art and everyday life. But the dadaists abandoned the pretense of still life or other identifiable subject matter in favor of abstract collages, and they cast their net far wider for their source material: the collages of Hannover dadaist Kurt Schwitters, for example, included such items as transportation tickets, calendars, candy wrappers, lace, printed pamphlets, maps, and other disposable ephemera collected in the course of the artist’s daily outings. Collaged together, they formed a chaotic visual diary of modern life.DaDa

I have always worked in collages as a medium for sketching, rapidly taking chucks of separate realities to form a new one. Seriously I stared to work in the medium when I moved to the Czech Republic and living space was scarce. I began to notice that with this increased concentration to the medium, the pieces were not just sketches anymore, but stand alone pieces. With a bit of digital enhancement and good quality printing, the pieces become more flowing and uniform than in their original stage. The physical-ness of collage-making appears disarmingly simple so that their significance easily escapes notice. When they are taken together, as an integrated series of transformations, a quite surprising symbolism appears. The activities entailed in making and physically transforming collages can then be seen to embody the logic of psychological development. These activities comprise an extended metaphor: they symbolize the growth of the human mind.