Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) spent most of his life in the German city of Hanover, before being driven into exile by the increasing Nazi threat in 1937. Schwitters took refuge in Norway and then in England, where he lived until his death in 1948. Kurt Schwitters' first known collage, Hansi dates from 1918, and soon afterwards he begun making assemblages from scraps of refuse, including one he called the Merz picture. Subsequently he referred to all of his work as "Merz".

Shcwitters was the first to envisage an aesthetic that incorporated painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre and poetry simultaneously, as embodied in his "Merz" art--of which he was the sole exponent. Schwitters made no effort to represent reality as conveyed by the senses; but instead tried to recreate his own concept of reality in the form of collage, a visual embodiment of the fragmented world he saw around him. KURT SCHWITTERS: Collage Eye is both a reflection of an era as well as a window into the soul of an artist.

This concise and illuminating exhibition looks at works by Schwitters and his contemporaries that testify to the impact of historical events and also a shared formal and conceptual approach to art-making. After World War II, Schwitters' work influenced a number of contemporary artists beyond the borders of Germany in their adoption of collage and assemblage techniques and their choice of materials.

The second part of the exhibition considers Shwitters' artistic legacy across the 20th century with selections drawn from both the Canadian and international collections of the National Gallery of Canada.

           

Related Programming

collage-a-thon
Friday, September 14, 8 pm-1 am

ART GALLERY OF ALBERTA 
Free Admission

Latitude 53 (artist-run centre) and Edmonton artist Tim Rechner, have organized an annual Draw-a-thon for the past three years: an evening of collaborative cutting and pasting, free drawing, music and serious schmoozing.

Rechner turns rumours of the death-of-the-author upside down, and counters by claiming that everyone's-an-author. We agree, so in the spirit of disciplined anarchism, Dada, da da, dandies and Kurt Schwitters, we invited him to shake us up and stage this year's edition at the AGA. You can't not be there.

View collage-a-thon poster

 

MERZ Performance and Special Action-Event
Peter Froehlich, Actor, Professor University of Ottawa
Thursday, September 20, 6:30 pm

A theatrical performance of Kurt Schwitters' poems and plays (approximately 2 hours)
ART GALLERY OF ALBERTA
Free Admission

Peter Froelich first developed his solo recital of Kurt Schwitters' salon performances for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1976. Garnering rave reviews around the world each time it was performed, MERZ has been resurrected for KURT SCHWITTERS: Collage Eye. Presented as part of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, Froehlich review the Sneeze-, Cough-and Stutter-Poems, Anna Blossom and The Causes and Outbreak of the Grand and Glorious Revolution in Revon.

Don't miss this rare opportunity to experience a virtuosic performance of 'spoken words' (with no words!) by one of the 20th century's most innovative artists.

Produced in partnership with the Edmonton Poetry Festival.

 

Inside Art Lecture Series

Production and Consumption in the Collages of Kurt Schwitters
Steven Harris
Thursday, October 11, 7 pm

Fine Arts Building (FAB) 2-20, University of Alberta
112th Street at 89th Avenue
Free Admission: sponsored by the Dept. of Art and Design

Dr. Harris is the author of Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics and the Psyche (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and numerous articles on twentieth-century art. His current book-length research project is entitled The Poetics of Disenchantment: The European Avante-Garde at Mid-Century.
Steven Harris, Associate Professor, University of Alberta, History of Art, Design and Visual Culture

  

 

Kurt Schwitters' Cathedral of Erotic Misery: The Merzbau
Elizabeth Burns Gamard
Thursday, October 25, 7 pm

Fine Arts Building (FAB) 2-20, University of Alberta
112th Street at 89th Avenue
$10 / $5 AGA Members / no charge for University of Alberta students and staff

In Elizabeth Burns Gamard's book on Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), she claims taht his belated insertion into art history was due not only to the Nazi upheaval, but even more crucially, to his unrelentingly improvisational and hybridizing artistic methods. Schwitters, Gamard claims, was a 'proto-postmodernist'.
Elizabeth Burns Gamard, Associate Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture, Tulane University, New Orleans

  

 

Fragments: Resurrecting Beauty from the Ruins
An Adult Education Inservice
Friday, October 12, 9 am-3:30 pm

ART GALLERY OF ALBERTA
$75 per person

Challenge your perceptions of art and art-making in this full-day inservice. Through an analysis of artworks and found poetry, investigate the socio-political context and methodology behind expressionism and DADA collage works in the exhibition KURT SCHWITTERS: Collage Eye. Express your artistic self in an afternoon of art-making while you investigate collage in the 21st century.

To register of for more information, contact the AGA's Education Programs Manager at 422.6223 ext. 243 by Tuesday, October 9.