The beautiful decorative patterns of faux tribal masks
"The young Dutch designer starts each of his creations on the basis of a material experiment. This enables him to discover production techniques and aesthetic developments. The result lies within unusual and attractive patterns, colours and structures. ... His love for materials has given birth to a passion for textiles that have a strong impact on his creations and pushed him to imagine a series of bizarre masks, in 2010; masks that are to Matisse, 'a characteristic sign of our essence'."
(The Red List)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Photomontages of Hannah Höch
"The 'bob–haired muse', the 'holy shears' and 'Dada's good girl' are a few of the epitaphs that prevail in the comfortable little niche art history has carved out for Hannah Höch. These sound bites are seriously challenged by this travelling retrospective organised by the Walker Art Center. 'The Photomontages of Hannah Höch' momentously reconstructs her marginalised role in early 20th–century art and perhaps even ordains her as the single most influential female artist of the century. The exhibition surveying Höch's 55 years of photomontage not only rescues her from the anti–art antics of the legendary Berlin Dada circle but inclusively chronicles her private and aesthetic journey through the social and cultural constructs that have emerged in the 20th century. While she may have been remembered by her bombastic Dada colleagues for her 'sandwiches, beer and coffee', her lifetime of artistic practice reveals a vital and critical woman who could magically collide disparate reproductions of needlepoint patterns, political figures, film stars, animal life and non–Western artefacts into explorations of androgyny, Aryan activity, gender roles, imperialism, race and lesbianism."
(Michelle Grabner, Issue 33 March–April 1997, Frieze Magazine)
Fig.1 Hannah Höch "Entwurf für das Denkmal eines bedeutenden Spitzenhemdes", 1922, Entwurf, Tafelmalerei, Collage, 27,4 x 17 cm, Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Ikonographie (Iconclass)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
