Cutting Edges: Contemporary Collage

Cutting Edges surveys the early-2010s resurgence of collage as a contemporary art and design practice, gathering the work of dozens of international artists and illustrators who cut, layer, and reassemble found photographs, prints, and ephemera into new compositions.

Published by Gestalten in Berlin in 2011 and edited by Robert Klanten, Hendrik Hellige, and James Gallagher, the 215-page hardcover volume opens with an essay tracing collage's roots in Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism, the movements that established the technique through artists such as Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and El Lissitzky, before turning to full-color spreads of contemporary work. Most pieces are made by hand from cut paper and found material rather than digital montage, with several contributors treating the omission of source imagery as deliberately as its addition.

Klanten, Gestalten's founder, has shaped numerous surveys of contemporary visual culture for the publisher, with Hellige co-editing alongside him. James Gallagher, who also wrote the preface, is a New York collage artist trained at the School of Visual Arts he has since curated international collage exhibitions and, in 2013, founded the art magazine Secret Behavior. Cutting Edges arrived early in a broader wave of surveys cataloguing collage's parallel analog and digital revival.