‘Collage! Collage! Collage!’ is a group exhibition combining new works of three visual artists: Vincent Delbrouk (BE), Miriam Tölke (DE) and Sarah Stone (UK).

The technique of collage allows artists to reconstruct the world which surrounds us, letting elements of abstraction and surrealism interfere on one surface. Provoking the viewer to curiously look, to discover. As Francesca Gavin famously wrote in “The Age of Collage” (2020), “we see more images than ever before, and collage is a way of making sense of that chaos”.

For Vincent Delbrouck (b. 1975, BE) collage is a secret, a practice taken from his ‘shady diaries’. The artist combines his photography with painting, contradictions with graces. Step by step, embraced by obsessions and guided by impulsion, the artist spills the red fluids creating the absence of hierarchy in between the images. In the artist’s words, the work expresses: “a pattern of dirty layers, archives sometimes in ruins, reborn for the pleasure of and joyful and naive iconoclast”.

Miriam Tölke (b. 1977, DE) is a part of the new generation of collage makers, who have a deep sense of changing the perspective we look at the world around us. Her series ‘New Horizons’ is shaped of black and white tones, sparingly adding colour into the works. A recurring and significant motif in her work is a human face, whose reliability and truthfulness she questions in radical ways. Miriam’s inspiration is rooted in Surrealism, Dada and avant-garde art movements like Paris- based “Lettrist International” (1952 – 1957) or “Situationist International” (1957 – 1972), which decontextualised everyday culture, creating collage ́s first revival.

Sarah Stone’s (b. 1994, UK) photographic collages are often rendered sharply and colourfully, that she orientates alongside her eye for antiquity and architecture. Using black and white found imagery from old architectural books and interior magazines, Sarah cuts, slices, and layers paper. In this way she reconstructs the view of French castles and English cathedrals, interfering in stone facades and ornate interiors that often have a touch of opulence. She counters the black and white images with snippets of bright colour, coming to complete the composition with playfully cut out coloured paper or scraping a strip of the collage with acrylic paint. Sarah Stone is currently finalising her bachelor degree in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp.

Image annoucnement: Miriam Tölk