A Century of Collage

“Collage forces you to think and clarify ideas, with regard to both space and volumes. This discipline obliges me to think in terms of forms, outlines, real and imagined spaces, so as not to fall into the temptation of thinking that nature is a reality.”
-Conrad Marca-Relli

January 11, 2020 - Rosenberg & Co. is pleased to present A Century of Collage, a group exhibition offering a glimpse into the world of collage from the 1920s through contemporary use. The collages in this selective survey encompass a variety of schools and movements including Cubism, British Modernism, and Abstract Expressionism, among others. As demonstrated by artists working on both sides of the Atlantic, the works in this show reflect the technique’s standing as a powerful contribution to art of the last hundred years. 

Beginning with a cubist still life by Ismael Gonzalez de la Serna and abstractions by Balcomb Greene, the exhibition traces the technique of collage through the use of both found materials and intentionally composed elements, often combined with traditional methods of painting and drawing. Henri Laurens’ Aphrodite et Séléné and Zeus et Hermès, studies for book illustrations, provide a lens into the artist’s working process, while their collage composition posits classical subject matter together with a modern visual language. The legacy of synthetic cubism’s relationship with collage is on display in Morris Barazani’s Collage #16 and Untitled (Derek Timmerman), where newsprint and other fragments form a flattened abstract picture plane. In his Standing Figure, Conrad Marca-Relli employs the medium to capture the shadows and movement of the human form. Examples by Jean-Michel Coulon, Marcin Dudek, Maysey Craddock, and others demonstrate collage’s enduring appeal as a site of material innovation, using both newly available materials and those popularized by their forebears to construct both figurative and abstract compositions.

Featuring 32 works, A Century of Collage celebrates the medium’s historic and present vitality in modern and contemporary artistic practice.