NYAB Event - "Fragments: Modern and Contemporary Collage" Exhibition

"Fragments: Modern and Contemporary Collage" Exhibition

ACA Galleries

This event has ended.

ACA Galleries' exhibition of 20th and 21st century collage, Fragments 1915-2011: Modern and Contemporary Collage, reveals the scope and depth of a medium sometimes overlooked but currently gaining notice among scholars and cultural tastemakers.

Spanning nearly a century, the breadth of the ACA exhibition documents how collage's use of bits and pieces of applied materials is unique in its ability to capture physical moments of time: the created or found materials of the early 20th century, its pigments and fonts and ephemera, tell very different stories than the wildly varied, often inorganic or digital materials available to collagists working in the 21st. Collage has the ability to bring a tactile, physical experience of human history into the reality-presence of the viewer.

From the exhibition's earliest work, Max Weber's 1915 Blue Collage, through the work of mid-20th century Abstract giants such as Grace Hartigan and Louise Nevelson, through Andy Warhol's Pop explosions, Red Grooms' multi-media scenarios and Judy Chicago's Feminist upending of accepted art history, the exhibition brings us up-to-date on collage's Renaissance as a contemporary power in art.

21st century collagists such as Philomena Marano give us fantastical visions of urban life; Greg Lamarche speaks in an elegant voice of the outlaw street; Irene Hardwicke Olivieri returns to organic materials to reconnect to a more primitive human psyche, while Debra Pearlman marries the technology of photography to the natural act of drawing and to organic materials and textiles to explore the experience of fear, anxiety and the possibility of healing in our frenzied contemporary life.

Curator Mikaela Sardo Lamarche has organized a comprehensive exhibition that documents collage's modern history, demonstrates its international and intergenerational scope, and, uniquely, reveals the importance of women in this highly tactile medium.

Unlike exhibitions of paintings and sculpture covering the same period, where men tend to dominate, Fragments 1915-2011: Modern and Contemporary Collage contains work by men and women in nearly equal measure. Collage's distinctive ability to tactilely convey moments in time may prove to be the great equalizer of art history.