The Summer Show 2016

Five artists from five different countries show a collection of collage works, each approaching the medium in their own unique way.

Ruth van Beek (1977, the Netherlands) works with a growing archive of found photographic material, images are arranged in constantly changing ways. From these odd combinations and decontextualized images she makes her work. Van Beek treats the photos she collects as objects. By cutting and folding, adding shapes of watercolor painted paper and connecting similar elements in different pictures, she makes the form, scale and colour interplay. These interventions are never hidden, but play a lead role in the work.

Jean-Francois Lepage's (1960, France) phantasmagorical universe, blending couloured shapes and pale skin characters, mixes photographs and abstract forms after scratching the negatives itself. For his Recycle series, Lepage decided to reuse some old photographs he had shot using Polaroids. He cut and engraved these old images, building up new complex and multi-layered ones.

Eva Stenram (1976, Sweden/UK) uses vintage pin-up photographs as its source material. In the series 'Drape' the women are posed in interior domestic sets in front of curtains or drapes, offering a glimpse into intimate space. In the series 'Parts' the pictures are digitally altered, obliterating most of the model and leaving only a leg intact. The resultant mood is macabre – the severed limb does not entice and the original photograph's erotic effect is turned on its head.

Katrien de Blauwer (1969, Belgium) calls herself a "photographer without a camera". She collects and recycles pictures and photos from old magazines and papers. Her work is, simultaneously, intimate, directly corresponding with our unconscious, and anonymous thanks to the use of found images and body parts that have been cut away. This way, her personal history becomes the history of everyone. The collage effects a kind of universalisation, emphasizing the impossibility to identify with a single individual, yet allowing to recognize oneself in the story.

Michael Etzensperger (1982, Switzerland) created a series called „Masks“. Using the text Negerplatik by Carl Einstein as an inspiration he double exposed all kinds of masks from ethnological books. He combined African masks with similar masks from countries like Switzerland and many more.