The New World

Collage and visual poetry from the German mail artist Horst Hahn, whose The New World layers wartime aircraft photography, road signage, and cut typography into a dense artist's book issued as volume 137 in Redfoxpress's C'est mon Dada series.

Published in December 2019, the 40-page hardcover is thread-and-quarter-cloth bound and laser-printed on ivory paper, in the A6 format (10.5 × 15 cm) standard to the series. Hahn builds each spread from salvaged ephemera &mdash maps, product labels, comic lettering, a photograph of a WWII-era bomber &mdash layering found text and image in the collage tradition Kurt Schwitters established with Merz.

Hahn (b. 1937, Bergisch Gladbach) spent decades as a professional restorer, working from 1968 to 1996 on Joseph Beuys's works in the van der Grinten collection at Museum Schloß Moyland, while corresponding through mail-art networks since the early 1970s. He has issued the graphic edition Zufall since 1974 and pursues travel photography of Africa with his wife Barbara. The New World extends that same instinct for reassembling found material into book form.