SpallArt Collection - Faszination Fotocollage

Exhibition

Faszination Fotocollage

August 31 to October 12, 2024
Forum für Fotografie, Cologne

On loan

“The meaning of the images is created in the mind. And because we are also what we have seen, the following applies: so many viewers, so many different images, even if we are all looking at the same collage.”
Christoph Stölzl, 2023

The exhibition is a tribute to the art form of collage, which developed revolutionarily as an independent art form of classical modernism from the pictorial worlds of Cubism, Surrealism and the Dadaists. The exhibition shows two focal points that stand for the development of collage in its special form as photo collage. Firstly, the work “Diurnes. Decoupages et Photographies” by Pablo Picasso, which he developed together with his close friend, the photographer André Villers, and secondly the contemporary photo collages by the Berlin artist Miriam Tölke. To demonstrate the historical and contemporary diversity of the photo collage technique, the exhibition also includes exemplary works by Horacio Coppola, Valie Export, John Everard, Karin Fissthaler, Maryam Mottalebi, Bernhard Hosa and Elfriede Mejchar.

In his Cubist phase, Pablo Picasso played a central role in the development and popularization of the collage technique. In his collages, he used materials such as newspaper cuttings, wallpaper, fabrics and found objects. He used the technique to question traditional stylistic devices of painting by destroying pictorial continuity, central perspective and fictional levels. Miriam Tölke no longer has to struggle with these historically developed positions. The principle of collage has become timeless. In contemporary fragmentations, the artist plays with unpredictable confrontations, abstract spaces, flawless fashion photography and poetic superimpositions in a seemingly carefree manner.