“The Ends of Collage” Exhibition

Luxembourg & Dayan

This event has ended.

Luxembourg & Dayan presents The Ends of Collage an exhibition that unfolds in two parts across the gallery’s New York and London spaces. Its title refers both literally and metaphorically to the place where collage fulfills its calling - at the ends or edges of pictures and fragments, where separate worlds come together or break apart from one another. However, the notion of ‘ends’ also implies a more provocative proposition: that collage can be seen as a radical historical event that ended as the concept of ‘cut and paste’ gradually infiltrated the mainstream language of all visual communication.

The Ends of Collage juxtaposes early experiments of collage-making from the first decades of the 20th century with later technical and conceptual innovations produced by artists who found themselves operating at the dawn of the digital age in the 1970s and 1980s and up to the present day. The exhibition abandons the well-rehearsed historical narrative that is commonly accepted through such conventional categories as Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, and so on, to revisit collage as a set of such technical and conceptual artistic gestures.

In New York the exhibition will trace some of the technical characteristics of collage, examining various forms of cutting, tearing, or pasting images, and will explore the relationship between collage and the screen. In London the exhibition will follow some of the more thematic ends of collage: the medium’s restless pursuit of fantastic worlds; its inherent relationship with the domestic sphere; its insistence on disfiguring and dismembering the human body; and its violent relationship with its own sources of materials and inspirations.

Curator Yuval Etgar, a doctoral candidate in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, explains: “In a time where the terms ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ refer more often to allegorical and digital operations than to the use of scissors and glue, it seems imperative to go back and examine the technical invention that lies on the historical seam between pictures and images, between manual craft and the mediated reality of the digital age.”

The Ends of Collage will be accompanied by an anthology of texts that explore the history of collage and the kind of sensitivity that this medium bequeathed to contemporary art practitioners. This collection will include writings by Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Craig Owens, John Stezaker, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler and Sherrie Levine.