Further research : collage
Katrien De Blauwer
Katrien De Blauwer calls herself a "photographer without a camera". She collects and recycles pictures and photos from old magazines and papers. Her work is, at the same time, intimate, directly corresponding with our unconscious, and anonymous thanks to the use of found images and body parts that have been cut away. This way, her personal history becomes the history of everyone. The collage effects a kind of universalisation, emphasizing the impossibility to identify with a single individual, yet allowing to recognize oneself in the story. The artist becomes a neutral intermediary: without being the author of the photographs, she appropriates and integrates them into her own interior world, a world she’s revealing in third person.
“Returning constantly to female bodies, the montages have a strange erotic resonance, as dark and murky as surrealists or dadaists, with floating, disembodied limbs and lips, noses and toes, and intrusions of red paint. Her process of deconstructing and reassembling becomes a comment on the depiction of women in the source images of the mid-20th century, at a time when image culture started to take off. It evolves into the present perception of female forms and how the past has instilled contradictory ideas about femininity and femaleness.
These are tensions felt by the artist herself and revealed by the openness of her modus operandi: on the one hand, between De Blauwer’s clear appreciation of fashion and her attraction to beauty, and on the other, her desire to tell new stories by reinventing these old images and ideas, cultivating a different narrative entirely.
After all, why do we rip, tear and cut things up, if not to express our dissatisfaction with the status quo?”
Wallpaper 23 Nov 2019
Katrien has inspired me to dig through my photographic archives more and reuse my work in a different capacity likely alongside recent photos of child/motherhood. Of course my laptop would choose this moment to stop working 🙄
Anthony Gerace
Gerace’s work is driven by experimentation rather than concept. Most of his work comes out of playing with materials and images but there are some recurring themes – all of his work is in some way inspired by “time and memory and material, and how they relate to one another”.
There Must Be More to Life Than This was created by cutting up and reassembling ads from the 1940s and 70s. The collages are built from a single source, with photographs of smiling men and women cut into pieces and reassembled to create something abstract. These images are frustrating in their incompleteness – as a viewer, we want to rearrange the tiles or fill in the blanks to make a whole – and Gerace says they speak to the idea of searching for coherence and completion.
Creative Review UK 5 Mar 2018
Inspired by his approach to colour - I especially enjoy his (almost) monochromatic compositions - and the process of subtraction
