Photomontage

I adore photomontage and all that it has stood for. From as early as the Dada movement around 1915 when artists were revolting and reacting against the horrors of the war. Their aim was to destroy traditional values in art and to create a new art to replace the old. Photomontage was born. Hannah Hoch was a pioneer of Dada who also worked in this medium expressing the complex imagery in her montage work and she explores her fragmented life as a woman within a male dominated art movement and pre-war and post-war society in Germany.

How cool are these! Still so current to me, timeless. I am going to put my printing skills to the test and make a photomontage. Watch this space.

Peter Kennard 1949-present 'Photo-Op'

I particularly like the work of Peter Kennard, for over twenty-five years Kennard has been producing political photomontages and installation works. He wanted to bring art and politics together for a wider audience. His work interacts with the politics from actual events and he shows how a visual motif can be re-used in different contexts.

Kennard’s photomontages are full of; history, irony, fury and anger and have been described as ‘still lives of grief’, they acknowledge the pain of what is happening and remind us of the need to speak out in protest. His work signifies to me the very essence of postmodern art, he has embraced a playfulness and irony to his serious, political, radical war images, blurring the boundaries between the avant-garde and popular culture and creating an intertextual language and for us all to enjoy. He is known internationally with his work and has shown in galleries, on the streets, in newspapers and in magazines and books. He is perhaps inspired by the 1930’s German artist John Heartfield, Kennard assembles his montages by hand, combining and rearranging images from the media to explore issues such as economic inequality, police brutality, and the nuclear arms race. His work still seems as relevant now as it did twenty or thirty years ago. Here is some of his work.