Anthony

Gerace

Creating collages can be like putting together a puzzle. Anthony Gerace (*1983, Canada) makes this aspect a central motif of his painstakingly precise collage works. In his "There Must Be More To Life Than This" series Gerace transforms found images of glamorous portraits into squares, reconfiguring them into new and contemporary tile compositions. His work often raises questions about time and memory, celebrating and negotiating the inherent deterioration of ephemera and printed matter. Originally from Toronto and now based in Glasgow, Scotland, Gerace also works as a photographer, slowly aligning both practices as demonstrated in his series „WORLD“ and „The ruined map". His approach is a beguiling combination of the intuitive and the mechanical, with a heightened emphasis on the hand-crafted physicality of collage.

Guest Curator — Valerie von Meiss

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Collage is, traditionally, a medium resistant to systems. The overarching conceit of the form, that of taking images of the past and reconfiguring them into new artworks, seems counter to the idea of seriality. I’ve begun to think of collage in terms of typology, trying to see how pliant a rigid system can become through repetition. Seeing how, and if, meaning can be derived with and through minimal change. Seeing if doing the same thing over and over is a strategy or a cul de sac or neither or both.

Anthony Gerace

Anthony Gerace's practice is interested in the ways materiality, surface, and cultural semiotics can engage to create a body of work that is both of a place and at a remove from it, through a combination of archive building, photomontage and site-specific image-making. Landscape photography and collage function less as concrete mediums than as elements in an evolving process geared toward the exploration of historicity and the passage of time, and the experience of being outside of oneself. Instead of situating any given body of work as a collection of “finished pieces”, he is instead interested in looking at the totality of the work as a durational, ever-evolving process taking into account location and form without being wholly reliant on either.

Anthony Gerace

Anthony Gerace is currently based in the United Kingdom.

GUEST CURATOR

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VALERIE VON MEISS

Valerie von Meiss is the founder of The Curve, a private project space and nomadic gallery in Berlin which has a focus on contemporary collage.

The Curve is a private art space and nomadic gallery exclusively dedicated to the exhibition and promotion of contemporary collage art. Young emerging as well as established artists are given a platform here. Founded in 2017 in the hallway of a private apartment in Berlin Mitte, the Curve regularly takes over pop-up spaces and believes in collaborations beyond the traditional gallery landscape.

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