Surreal art by contemporary artists
Collage is a technique of an art production, primarily used in the visual arts, where the artwork is made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole.
A collage may sometimes include magazine and newspaper clippings, ribbons, paint, bits of colored or handmade papers, portions of other artwork or texts, photographs and other found objects, glued to a piece of paper or canvas. The origins of collage can be traced back hundreds of years, but this technique made a dramatic reappearance in the early 20th century as an art form of novelty.
The term collage was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.
With the advent of digital tools such as Photoshop, collage in contemporary surrealistic art become one of the primary techniques to create surreal artwork. Simultaneously, with the ubiquity of camera phones (everyone is a photographer) and screens (how many ads do we see a day?) we a seeing a more nostalgic style to the style of some surreal artists. This may be a reaction to conceptual art and our digital interfaces as a way to differentiate art from, well, not art. This is not just simulated with retro styled photo filters but with the choice of materials. Artists such as Eugene Loli, Trash Riot, and Felipe Posada make ample use of decades-old illustration and photography. With this choice of materials, the work separates itself from “regular” photography (a window into the world) or film and develops its own retro-futuristic or retro-psychedelic aesthetic. Other Collage artists such as Khan Nova and Wahndur use digital tools and clean, contemporary styles to create their own surrealistic visions.
My work is a loose collection of thoughts and observations in many ways and less about one specific theme. I see it as being a reflection of the world we live in, with all its ugliness and cruelty. But from that, I strive to extract the beauty and empathy hidden underneath and within us all, revealing the unknown, the unspoken and intangible things that make us truly human. For me, collage as a medium replicates this frenetic and inherent collision of people, culture, and emotions we all experience. I believe the true meaning of my work is derived directly from the intertwining of these associations, and the spontaneity of my creative process. This gives my work the freedom to live creatively in the moment, and the ability to respond to current events, despite my imagery being derived primarily from vintage magazines.
Beth Hoeckel is a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator from Baltimore.
She earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied painting, photography, and printmaking— but her main area of expertise is in the medium of collage. Beth began her first widely-known series of collages in 2010, and has been a full-time freelance artist since 2012. Over the past 5 years her work has been exhibited around the world and published in many prestigious books and magazines.
Beth can currently be found creating collage and mixed media art for arts’ sake, as well as illustrating for a variety of clients including Rookie, Domino, The New York Times, and many more.
Frank Moth creates nostalgic postcards from a distant but at the same time familiar future. He makes digital collages and compositions with specific, distinctive color palettes, in a critically acclaimed style that is immediately recognizable. Frank Moth was born in Athens in March 2014. He exists as an artist and as an alias for the two people that hide behind him. He has been featured in many publications worldwide, such as Huffington Post US, as well as Buzzfeed and MTV Greece. His work is currently showcased around the world in many galleries online
The compositions are mainly human-centered. The presence of the human element is obvious, yet perpetually incomplete. There’s always something missing, interrupted, or covered. The face, for example, is usually covered and many times it’s not even there, so as to not surrender its vulnerable introspection, insecurity, and psychic truth without a fight.
In many of Frank Moth’s works people are pictured gazing upon themselves and their own lives on Earth from some distant point in outer space. The perspective of all things always seems to be on a strange verge, between a dream and an urban daily life.
The smothering failure of man to define and refine happiness today within geographic, temporal, and material {technological and consumerist} bounds, is repeatedly alluded to through the use of old, manipulated paper ads from decades past, as well as old fashion magazines.
Many of the artworks feature a subtle expression of companionship or the silent, solitary, obsessive search for it {the people usually have their backs turned and there is a hint of movement in the scenery}, combined with the surreal size disproportion and the disturbed relation between man and his environment/surroundings.
This is an attempt to create harmony between people and their surroundings, however imaginary, by using the eternal elements of colours, numbers, simple geometric shapes, symmetry, and subtraction, as well as universal words and concepts like “love”, “together”, “forever”, “never”, “infinity”, “why”.
Deborah Stevenson was born in Washington, DC. She grew up in Tokyo, went to high school in Baltimore, and got her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She lived for many years on the West Coast, and returned to the East Coast, where she lived in Brooklyn, NYC until 2015, when she relocated to the coastal town of Belfast, Maine.
My first medium is oil, and I have been a painter for nearly 30 years. I began composing collage pieces in earnest 5 years ago, working with material in magazines, books, newspapers, etc. My influences include the pioneer collage/surreal artists: Braque, Ernst, Hannah Hoch, Joseph Cornell, Magritte, to name a few, as well as the German Expressionists in all media. Other influences in visual media include masters in film and photography, both contemporary and classical
A life-long interest in Eastern philosophy and Jungian psychology have contributed to my fascination with allegory and symbology. Themes that recur in my work express metaphorically my exploration of concepts of power, beauty, the Feminine, and mysterious archetypal conjunctions.
The work arises in an ‘automatic’ way; I do not set out with an objective or goal in my mind when I sit down to make something. The images compose themselves spontaneously as I mix and move the masses of paper around on the table in front of me. I feel as though my eyes and hands facilitate the ‘arrival’ of the pictures that I make. More than anything else, the process requires of me that I pay attention, and to be in a receptive state, so as to be ready to capture the dialogue.
