Cut & Paste

The manipulation of photographic imagery is as old as photography itself, but the modernist conception of photomontage was a radical extension of techniques and creative attitudes that first emerged in Cubist, Futurist and Dadaist collage, in which cut-out photographs and fragment of newsprint from illustrated journals were pasted into drawings and paintings. This method of combining and manipulating photographic elements was developed towards the end of the FirstWorldWar by Dadaists in Berlin such as John Heartfield, George Grosz, Johannes Baader and Hannah Hoch. Simultaneously, in Moscow young Constructivist artists such as Gustav Klucis, Varvara Stepanove and El Lissitzky began to incorporate ‘photomontage’, full of modernist connotations and derived from engineering and film editing, set the technique apart from traditional artistic practices.

Curated by Lutz Becker, Cut & Paste provides a rediscovery of the sources of modern image making, exploring the work of the great predecessors and innovators who created photomontages by phisical means with scissors, scalpel and retouching brush.

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