The Age of Collage: Contemporary Collage in Modern Art
The Age of Collage: Contemporary Collage in Modern Art gathers the cut-and-paste practices of dozens of contemporary artists into the first volume of Gestalten's ongoing collage anthology, documenting the medium's resurgence in the early 2010s.
Structured as a survey rather than a monograph, the book opens with a foreword by curator and art historian Silke Krohn tracing collage's lineage from Cubism, Merz, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism through Pop Art and the combine paintings that followed, before profiling the artists who inherited that vocabulary. The artists collected here mine found photographs, scientific imagery, pop-cultural ephemera, and vintage erotica, favoring an interdisciplinary, cross-media approach that treats destruction and construction as a single gesture.
The volume was edited by Bremen-based artist Dennis Busch (b. 1971) with Gestalten founder Robert Klanten and designer Hendrik Hellige. Busch, who has cut and reassembled vintage imagery since the late 1980s as a self-described image butcher, became the throughline of the series he helped launch: The Age of Collage Vol. 2 followed in 2016, with Vol. 3 continuing the project and expanding its roster of contemporary collage artists.
