Surrealism explored the workings of the mind, championed the irrational, and found magic and strange beauty in the unexpected, the uncanny, the disregarded, and the unconventional. Aiming to revolutionize the human experience, surrealism rejected a rational vision of life in favor of one that asserted the value of the unconscious and dreams.
Commonly used techniques in the Surrealism art movement include:
Juxtaposition— the act of positioning two or more things side by side; specifically, things that don’t normally go together, such as overlapping two images in impossible combinations.
Incongruity— something that is not harmonious to its surroundings; inappropriate; objects placed somewhere they shouldn’t be.
Transformation— turning something familiar into something unusual and disturbing.
Grotesque— strange and unpleasant, especially in a silly or slightly frightening way; comically ugly or repulsive.
Surrealist landscapes tapped into a different source for imagery: the subconscious mind.
The landscapes shown here reflect the uncanny, sometimes elusive imagery of dreams, myth, and fantasy. At times lacking recognizable geological elements such as mountains, hills, or vistas, these works confound traditional expectations of the landscape genre, and propose that the interior world of the psyche is as complex and ripe for exploration as the world beyond our bodies.
Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works, which spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with radical left-wing and far-left politics
Though the two movements embraced different philosophies—Surrealism was interested in psychology and the unconscious while Dada embraced nonsense—they both involved unusual distortions and juxtapositions.
Photomontages grew out of dadaism, uniting disparate images from mass media into new, revealing compositions.
Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978) was an artistic and cultural pioneer. She co-invented photomontage with then-partner Raoul Hausmann. They were both members of the Berlin Dada anti-art movement. Höch was an early feminist and questioned conventional ideas about women’s role in society, gender relationships, beauty and the making of art. She believed that the purpose of art was to change society and that the artist had to take a stance.
Raoul Hausmann (July 12, 1886 – February 1, 1971) was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry, and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.
Lorna Simpson: https://lsimpsonstudio.com/collages
John Stezaker: https://www.saatchigallery.com/artist/john_stezaker
Renee Mathews: https://www.reneemathews.com/
5 Contemporary Collage Artists Adding New Layers: https://magazine.artland.com/5-contemporary-collage-artists/