Décollage, Moscow

This print by German artist, scholar, designer and philosopher, Martin Krampen, is the image of a décollage—or reverse collage. Popularized in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s by avant-garde artists, décollages are created by deconstructing multi-layered posters from street advertising sites. For these artists, who identified with communism, the practice was a critique of capitalist consumerism. “Décollage, Moscow,” is rendered in silkscreen, a commercial print process often used to produce actual ad posters. Made in 1992, it shows shredded Cyrillic texts, hammer and cycle and star, perhaps not-so-subtle references to the USSR’s recent disintegration. Krampen’s work may be interpreted as a critique of the décollage artists, who were his contemporaries, and their politics.

-Leslie Luebbers, Director