Tomorrow Was a Montage
30 October - 18 December 2015

Cooper Gallery

Exhibition Talk by Andrzej Klimowski
Thursday 19 November 2015, 6 - 7pm


'Collage, a form of juxtaposition, surprise, shock and playfulness'

In this talk, graphic artist and designer Andrzej Klimowski will discuss the practice of collage as a prevalent method used in Polish graphic art and design throughout the twentieth century, reflecting on the works of artists in Tomorrow Was a Montage and their contemporaries in the Polish Poster School.

As a working method collage enables artists to arrive at provocative solutions to themes that address intellectual as well as artistic themes. The process of juxtaposing disparate elements and realities can keep work fresh and vital.

Roman Cieslewicz was a master of this form, moving from collaging old engravings echoing the work of Max Ernst and the Russian Constructivists, to the manipulation of contemporary photographic imagery. Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk took their collage techniques from graphic design into animation and experimental film raising the importance of free association and stream of consciousness. Even the more painterly designer Henryk Tomaszewski, built his designs through collaging painted elements and typographic forms. His students at the Academy followed his example which allowed for constant re-examing of design solutions.



Biography

Andrzej Klimowski studied painting at St Martin's School of Art in London and graphic design at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in Poland under professor Henryk Tomaszewski. From 1973-1980 he lived and worked in Warsaw designing theatre and film posters as well as contributing illustrations and designs for book publishers and the national press. He designed film titles for Polish TV and made experimental short films. From 1981 he has lived and worked in London working as a designer, illustrator and author of a number of graphic novels published by Faber & Faber and Self Made Hero. He has taught in several art schools in the UK and Europe, including the Royal College of Art in London where he is now Professor Emeritus.

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Bringing together work by Polish and Hungarian artists from three generations, Tomorrow Was a Montage in Cooper Gallery reveals a world torn asunder from the predictable and the known, the verifiable and the legitimate.

Montage, the practice of ‘citing without citations’; to quote the essential exponent of literal montage Walter Benjamin, is never neutral, never indifferent. With intimate strangeness montage unsettles all depictions of the world.

Fragments, juxtapositions, sudden illuminations, jarring proximities and a suspicion of systems; this is the image of the world offered by montage. Addressing time and space as a field of discontinuities, ruptures and breakages, montage overwhelms and unsettles perception. Pioneered in the first half of the twentieth century by the Surrealists and early Soviet filmmakers, montage became a radical subversive strategy of dissonance and shock for artists, designers, writers and thinkers seeking to challenge stereotypical images of the contemporary.

Tomorrow Was a Montage is an important opportunity to view rarely seen works that epitomise the visual language and polemical politics of the Former East in the 1960s and 70s, alongside contemporary works that demonstrate the enduring cogency of montage as an artistic method. Ranging across graphic design, animation, artists’ films and performance, Tomorrow Was a Montage features sixty significant poster works by the internationally celebrated Polish graphic designer and artist Roman Cieślewicz, films by preeminent film-makers Jan Lenica and Zbigniew Rybczyński, and a screening event of legendary film works by Hungarian painter and experimental filmmaker György Kovásznai. Bringing the ethos of the exhibition into the contemporary is the work of the up-and-coming Polish film and sound artist Wojciech Bąkowski.



For more information about the Tomorrow Was a Montage exhibition and events, please see: [ Ссылка ]

The galleries can be accessed via the Cooper Gallery doors at the east side of the DJCAD car park.

Opening hours: Monday - Friday: 10am - 5pm, Saturday: 11am - 5pm, Sunday: closed.

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