'Art of Parts', Art Gallery of NSW
Carl Plate untitled 1945
AGNSW Sept-Nov 2016
Art of Parts: collage & assemblage from the collection, explores the extraordinary potential of collage for invention and includes three of Carl Plate's collages from the mid-1940s, made as love poems to Jocelyn Zander.
Other artists represented include Tony Albert, Rosalie Gascoigne, James Gleeson, Katherine Hattam, Michael Johnson, Deborah Kelly, Robert Klippel, Colin Lanceley, Madonna Staunton and Eric Wilson.
Helen Campbell, Art Gallery of NSW assistant curator of Australian prints and drawings and watercolors:
“Collage is remarkable and wide-ranging in its ability to collapse boundaries and challenge conventions in art. Fascinating and provocative, the works in Art of parts vary greatly in scale, materials, in the extent of found elements used and in how they are put together.
“The genre is distinctive in its repurposing of ‘real world’ elements that trigger imaginative association. While each collage or assemblage component retains some mark of its origin, it is simultaneously transformed through incorporation into the work of art- creating an intriguing tension between its original and altered states,” Campbell said.
Showcasing a selection of works by some of Australia’s key pioneers of collage and assemblage as well as more recent practitioners, Art of parts: collage and assemblage from the collection brings together examples from the cubist and surrealist experiments of the 1940s, the exuberance and protest of the 1960s, the formal and poetic explorations of the 1970s, and the personal and political directions of the later 20th and 21st century.
