‘Tomorrow Was a Montage’ – work of celebrated East European artists to take place at Cooper Gallery
Published On Wed 14 Oct 2015 by Grant Hill
The next exhibition to take place at the University of Dundee’s Cooper Gallery will bring together work by three generations of Polish and Hungarian artists around the practice of montage.
Featuring graphic design, animation, films and performance, ‘Tomorrow Was a Montage’ opens on Thursday, 29th October. The exhibition features 60 poster works by the internationally celebrated graphic designer Roman Cie?lewicz, exhibited for the first time in Scotland, and films by preeminent filmmakers including Jan Lenica’s 1963 animation Labyrinth, considered to be one of the finest political animations ever made, and Zbigniew Rybczy?ski’s 1983 Oscar-winning Tango.
Bringing the ethos of the exhibition into the contemporary is the work of the up-and-coming film and sound artist Wojciech B?kowski, who will present a performance of sound collage during the preview evening on 29th October. Other events surrounding the exhibition include a talk by graphic artist and designer Andrzej Klimowski, who is an expert in the history of Polish Poster School, and a film screening of works by György Kovásznai on 26th November.
Pioneered in the first half of the twentieth century by the Surrealists and early Soviet filmmakers, montage became a radical subversive strategy of dissonance and shock for artists, designers, writers and thinkers seeking to challenge stereotypical images of the contemporary.
Its use was particularly common in Poland, where poster art was elevated to a new level and would go on to significantly influence the international development of graphic design. ‘Tomorrow Was a Montage’ provides an opportunity to view rarely seen works that epitomise the visual language and polemical politics of the Former East in the 1960s and 70s, alongside contemporary works that demonstrate the enduring cogency of montage as an artistic method.
“Montage is never neutral or indifferent,” said Cooper Gallery curator Sophia Hao. “The intimate strangeness of montage unsettles all depictions of the world, offering an alternative image through fragments, juxtapositions, sudden illuminations, jarring proximities and a suspicion of systems.
“Working without computer software and often within the political constraints of state Communism, Cie?lewicz, Lenica, Rybczy?ski and Kovásznai reveal an astonishing technical mastery of montage and its provocative political possibilities that are unsurpassed. Both Cie?lewicz and Lenica were part of the globally recognized Polish Poster School, an outstanding example of poster art.
“Hailing from Poznan in Poland, a city long associated with cultural freethinking and social-political resistance, the prolific contemporary artist Wojciech B?kowski witnessed the fall of the communist government and offers a dissonant antidote to the contemporary image of the real.”
‘Tomorrow Was a Montage’ opens at the Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, at a preview evening featuring a performance by Wojciech B?kowski on Thursday, 29th October. It will remain open until 18th December.
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