Artist Research

David Hockney

Prehistoric Museum Near Palm Springs, 1982

Robert Littman Floating in my Pool, Oct. 1982

Photographing Annie Leibovitz While She Is Photographing Me, Mojave Desert, Feb 1983

Celia's Children Albert + George Clark Los Angeles April 7th 1982

Nicholas Wilder Studying Picasso, Los Angeles 24th March 1982

Patrick Procktor, Pembroke Studios, London, 7th May 1982

Sun on the Pool Los Angeles April 13th 1982

David Hockney's photo collages and montages, known as 'Joiners', caught the eye of the public in the 1980's. The creation of the joiners had actually occurred accidentally. In the late 60s he noticed that photographers were starting to use cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures, which he wasn't particularly fond of because they always came out somewhat distorted. He was working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles where he decided to take some Polaroid shots of the room and glued them together, not actually intending them to be a composition on their own. When he looked at the final composition, he realised it actually created a narrative, as if the viewer of the piece was moving through the room. After this discovery he began working more and more with photography and exclusively pursued this new style. From 1982, he explored the use of camera, making compositions of Polaroid photographs arranged in a rectangular grid, later on using prints to create photo collages where he compiled a complete picture from a series of individually photographed details. The idea behind his use of grids was to try and make his pieces have an element of cubism.

Claire Pestaille

Carmen Dell' Orifice

Chrystal Time

Candelabra 

Madelaine

Isabelle

(Romance: The Big Sleep)

Claire Pestaille's 'The Crystalline Project' is a collection of disrupted vintage photographs, film stills and studio portraiture of women from the golden age of Hollywood. Duplicate images are geometrically divided, squared and cut, then reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle within the format of a grid in order to produce a 'fractured circuit' or a 'simultaneous double'. The grid format becomes both the 'compositional and conceptual device' for the theatrics of the deconstruction of the collage to take place, it is a place where identity is questioned, formed, reconstruction and also at time made unrecognisable.

Cinema II was another series of collage work that she did, it was actually one of her fist series produced which was inspired by film stills and Hollywood portraiture. It was based around stop motion and the concepts of time and movement as Pestaille finds this really interesting. The compositions produced in this series utilise single and double images of iconic portraits of Hollywood actors and actresses. They are sliced in vertical strips and the portraits are then layered to form a surreal visual experience and the optical sensations of vibration, movement and mutation.

Annegret Soltau

Motherhood

Grima

Motherhood

Annegret Soltau uses needle and thread to create grotesque looking collages, she rips up different images, mainly of peoples faces and combines them by stitching them together to create a new composition.