Zurich by Late Afternoon: Collage at the Intersection of Formand Image
Work by Leonard Beck, Dan Devening, Amy Sacksteder, and Scott Zieher
Collage began its long life in the realm of the objective—with a chair in 1912. From there, it went on to scramble and reassemble the world of things and information that shaped the modern socio-commercial landscape. Picasso famously pasted fragments of Le Figaro into his compositions, splintering and reassembling reality in a manner parallel to his Cubist paintings.
After World War I, the mood shifted. Picasso’s cheeky intellectualism gave way to irreverence, then to full-blown absurdity, when Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and the Arps presided over experimental sessions at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Pessimistic dissent had become an art form—one that would take root in the minds of generations of artists eager to dismantle the familiar world of printed and mass-produced material, remaking it into something distinctly their own.
From that basic gesture, countless aesthetic possibilities have emerged. This exhibition highlights four practices exploring the relationship between found image and constructed form. Leonard Beck’s groundbreaking work from the 1950s through the 1970sserves as both counterpoint and connective thread to the three contemporary artists featured here, each building a new world on top of one they found lying around.
