London,

Collage, London/New York

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Fred gallery, Vyner Street, E2

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Collage at the cutting edge

 

Interior design: Monkey and Radiator by Jakob Roepke

One day the Hayward or the Tate will mount a mammoth exhibition on the history of collage. Until then, this show serves as a dress rehearsal.

It’s a collaboration between the Fred gallery and little-known cult New York gallery Pavel Zoubok, which brings together new-generation twenty-something London artists, some famous names and overlooked talents.

It’s not exhaustive but it is of extraordinary breadth.
 
Collage, the arrangement of found items by the artist, whose first exponent is generally thought to be Picasso in the 1910s, is perhaps the defining medium of 20th-century art, with its combination of the ready-made and the hand-made.

For the Cubists, it was a strategy for bringing concrete reality into their painting. The Surrealists deployed it to create erotic juxtapositions and hybrid worlds.

Abstract artists did it with textures; Pop Artists did it with ads and logos, and conceptualists with neat grids.

Minimalists did it with very little but still managed transformed spaces (illustrated here, in the cleverest work in the show, by Dutch artist Jan Dibbets, who creates architecture by inserting a window into a monochrome painting).
 
There are no Picassos in this show, but plenty of others from modern masters. Gilbert and George deliver one of their entertaining chequerboards of postcards, in which identical photos of the young Prince Charles form a crucifix amid flowers (from 1981 — they were good in those days).

There is a characteristic post-war American collage using cigarette packets and bits of torn paper, from the painter Robert Motherwell; two gem-like stopwatches, whose mechanisms have been removed and replaced with fish and flowers, from Surrealist Joseph Cornell; and a version of Warhol’s Lenin made of pieces of red-painted paper.

So much for the greatest hits: even the most knowledgeable art-lovers will make discoveries here.

I liked the camp, precisely-scissored confections of young Londoner Jay Cloth, the Magpie-like Lilliputian assemblies of hinges and plastic jewellery of Samantha Donnelly and the absurdist interiors of Jakob Roepke.

Until 27 Sept, open Wed-Sun noon-8pm or by appointment (020 8981 2987, www.fred-london.com).

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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