Kurt schwitters collage techniques

The Museum is closed Mondays and major holidays. Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage. Adam Schrader ArtNet , July 29, In Princeton exhibition, Australian photographers show fear for — and pride in — their homeland. Hyperallergic , August 26, September 18, He actively produced artistic journals, illustrated works, and advertisements, as well as founding his own Merz journal.

He wrote poems and musical works that played with letters, lacing them together in unusual combinations, as he'd done in the collages, in the hope of encouraging his audience to find their own meanings. His multiple avant-garde efforts culminated in his large merzbau creations. These works, collaborations with other avant-garde artists, would start with one object to which others were added, causing the whole piece to change and evolve over time, growing to great proportions that forced the viewer to actually experience, rather than simply view, the art.

This work demonstrates a significant shift in Schwitters' early artistic practice from primarily conservative figurative painting to abstract collage. After World War I, Schwitters began to collect broken and discarded materials he found on the streets and arrange them into works of art. Born from the rubble left by the war, these works emphasize the fact that art can be made from destruction; that urban detritus could be made into something beautiful.

In Revolving , found items are organized to form lines and shapes to which he adds bits of yellow and blue paint for shading. He creates a geometrically harmonious work by finding a careful balance between the physical roughness of the found materials and the smooth shapes they form. The concept that attaching small objects not to mention - garbage to the surface of the canvas could be considered art was radical.

Yet Schwitters was convinced that the act of taking broken fragments and unifying them into a whole demonstrated art's potential to remake and reimagine a fractured world. Additionally, it enabled him to reject conventional illusionism, the rendering of objects as they appear, something he associated with trickery and even hypocrisy in light of the crumbling socio-economic situation in Germany following World War I.

In this work Schwitters continues his exploration of abstract collage, creating an intricate and complex work that incorporates many different materials and pieces. Merz Picture 32 A. The Cherry Picture is remarkable for its abstract design and its abandonment of any sense of illusionistic hierarchy. An interplay of colors light and dark areas as well as added materials such as wood and scraps of paper, suggest depth and there is a total abandonment of traditional one-point perspective.

Especially notable is the use of elements featuring text, such as product labels and newspaper clippings. These examples of commercial culture provoked the viewer to consider the relationship between art and everyday life. The focal point of the image is a white flashcard featuring a printed cluster of cherries and the German and French words for "cherry" upon which he has scribbled an ungrammatical phrase " Ich liebe dir!

He essentially takes a standard educational tool and destroys its utility with blatantly incorrect language. Like other Dada artists, Schwitters manipulated words and images in order to highlight the irrationality and arbitrariness of conventional systems, in this case, language. Cut and pasted colored and printed paper, loth, wood, meal, cork, oil, pencil, and ink on paperboard - The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Merz 11 offers an example of Schwitters work within the print media, groundbreaking both contextually and stylistically. The content of the Merz Magazine, launched by Schwitters in , was varied and eclectic, featuring a range of artistic forms, including poetry, prose, art and advertising, and representing a variety of avant-garde artistic movements including De Stijl, Constructivism, and Dada.

In this way the Merz journal united different avant-garde networks while serving as a platform to promote Schwitters' own diverse work. Formally, the journal had a very different look. With its bold red and black lines, irregularly positioned negative space, simplified sans-serif type, and asymmetrical layout, the cover of Merz 11 resembles the striking geometric style of Constructivism practiced at the Bauhaus.

Noted in other books and periodicals published at the time in both Europe and Russia, this aesthetic exemplifies the most innovative, daring and up-to-date graphic design trend. Unique to Schwitters' composition, however, is the unpredictable, irregular, and lively use of space on the pages. This would have been quite startling to the contemporary viewer.

The dynamic arrangement of text and the space left between on the page highlights the artist's awareness of typography's creative possibilities and his desire to elevate the status of graphic design to art. This work, featuring mono-color painted rectangles laid out side by side in a way that emphasizes the flatness of the canvas, demonstrates Schwitters' grasp of a more abstract style in the late s, one indicative of his growing interest in De Stijl.

It is the irregular arrangement of these shapes and the lively and expressive brushwork used to describe them that distinguishes the work from de Stijl's strictly linear and expressionless compositions. The artist's formal evolution is additionally noted in the way the artist alters his found materials, painting over their surfaces in an effort to deemphasize their origins as elements from the outside world.

To maintain some sense of a known reality, and perhaps even a sense of whimsy, he includes an easily recognizable object here: the enameled tin butterfly. There is indication that Schwitters originally intended to include other everyday objects as well a broken piece of china and two wooden balls that would project directly into the viewer's space in order to ground the work in the viewer's world.

Maraak encapsulates Schwitters' attempt to negotiate between the viewer's world and that presented within the constrictive space of the work itself, commenting on their overlapping yet ever distinct essence. Oil, rusted steel, laminate, enamled tin, butterfly, paper, cork, and china, mounted on board - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Schwitters' most ambitious work is a no longer existent multimedia construction that he eventually named the Merzbau. This project, located in the artist's Hanover studio, began as a single "column" comprised of cardboard scraps, newspaper clippings, and varied detritus. Schwitters continued to add objects to this "column" which gradually changed and transformed Schwitters' entire living space into a series of grottoes and caves.

While it is difficult to ascertain the exact appearance of what became this multi-room installation, as it was destroyed during the Second World War, written records and three photographs from document a sprawling accumulation of uncontained and varied material. He initially sought refuge in Norway, but was later interned as an enemy alien. After his release, Schwitters moved to England in , where he settled in the Lake District town of Ambleside.

Kurt schwitters collage techniques

He resided there until his death in The different places Schwitters called home played a role in shaping his artistic style and the themes explored in his works. Kurt Schwitters was born on June 20, Kurt Schwitters was born into a middle-class family in Hanover, Germany. His father, Eduard Schwitters, was a successful businessman who owned a lingerie shop, while his mother, Henriette Schwitters, managed the household.

Growing up in a relatively comfortable environment, Schwitters had the opportunity to explore his artistic inclinations from an early age. His Merz collages and magazines became iconic symbols of his artistic vision, influencing not only Dadaism but also the trajectory of modern art. In the tumultuous post-war context, artists turned to these radical art movements as a means of grappling with the chaos and disarray of the world.

Nicolene Burger is a South African multi-media artist, working primarily in oil paint and performance art. She was selected to take part in the ICA Live Art Workshop, receiving training from art experts all around the world. These performances led her to create exclusive performances from her home in to accommodate the mid-pandemic audience.

She also started focusing more on the sustainability of creative practices in the last 3 years and now offers creative coaching sessions to artists of all kinds. By sharing what she has learned from a year practice, Burger hopes to relay more directly the sense of vulnerability with which she makes art and the core belief to her practice: Art is an immensely important and powerful bridge of communication that can offer understanding, healing and connection.

Nicolene writes our blog posts on art history with an emphasis on renowned artists and contemporary art. She also writes in the field of art industry. Her extensive artistic background and her studies in Fine and Studio Arts contribute to her expertise in the field. July 17, Burger, N. Art in Context. Burger, Nicolene. Your email address will not be published.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors…in all of history! Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors! Skip to content. Table of Contents Toggle. Similar Posts. Schwitters gathered all his activities under the banner of Merz, a term he first used in and went on redefining for the rest of his life, which after was spent first in Norway and then in England, in impoverished exile from the Nazi authorities.

Or that is how Schwitters wished Merz to be received, which is not quite how it is experienced: again, as viewers we oscillate between the trash and the form, between Merz as crap we hear merde in the word and Merz as composition Freud and his colleagues speculated on the relationship of shit to art not long before Schwitters explored it in his own way.

And this struggle between sublimation and desublimation gives Merz its intensity to this day perhaps we hear Schmerz — pain — as well. Implicit in the integration of a Merz piece is its disintegration, which often became actual: the Merzbau in Hanover was bombed during the war; the one in Norway burned to the ground in ; the Merzbau in England, constructed in the Lake District, survives only partially, and maintaining the extant collages is a constant chore for museum conservators.

It is this tension between gestalt and entropy that later assemblagists indebted to Schwitters, from postwar artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Tinguely to contemporary practitioners — Isa Genzken, Thomas Hirschhorn, Sarah Sze and Rachel Harrison — have exploited in their own ways. Idea, material and artwork are identical.

Unlike these practitioners, however, Schwitters had only a limited interest in critique: art remained his primary aim. Schwitters took a different approach — he exploited banalities. He did the same with hostile art reviews, from which he extracted stupid lines and threw them back, mangled, as part of his response to critics. This kind of travesty is a verbal version of the general Dadaist strategy of taking a bad thing from the culture and making it worse — critique by way of mimetic exacerbation.

This suggests that a proverb is a commonplace that can call up a virtual public, since everyone knows a banal saying. Banalities may be degraded — they are made to be circulated and consumed — but in that process they are also rendered common.