Cutting Edges: Contemporary Collage

Cutting Edges documents the new heyday of collage in current art and visual culture. Today’s artists, illustrators, and designers are increasingly drawn to this artistic technique by the challenges of seamlessly melding traditional craftsmanship with skilled computer montage. They are not only composing a wide variety of visual elements, but are also deliberately omitting, deleting, and destroying them. This book is an inspiring collection of these unique examples of contemporary collage.

Collage has an outstanding tradition in the modern visual arts. Influenced by surrealism and Dada as well as constructivism, the technique was firmly established as an art form in the 1920s and 1930s through the work of artists such as John Heartfield, El Lissitzky, and Hannah Höch. Today, a new generation of young artists and illustrators is rediscovering collage.


Cutting Edges is a collection of current artistic work that unites unrelated elements to create something new. Although the artists also use the computer for the purpose of montage, most of the featured collages are made by hand and often include found objects. It is not only the addition of visual elements that is important to the work, but also their deliberate omission, deletion, and destruction.

While the combination of very different materials is charmingly reminiscent of the past, the innovative work in Cutting Edges proves that a new era of collage has begun.

Texts by curator Dr. Silke Krohn put this current rediscovery of collage into an art-historical context.