VOYAGE COLLAGE – Maud Tutsche, ARATORA, Jürgen Tenz

Works by Maud Tutsche, Jürgen Tenz († 2021) and ARATORA will be presented as the first in an annual series of exhibitions on the theme of collage. The exhibition aims to arouse curiosity about collage in a broader sense and thus raise awareness of the importance of searching for, collecting and reorganising things for the artistic process. The everyday, damaged and discarded objects are transformed and reinterpreted in this playful artistic work. In addition to classic collages, the three protagonists of the exhibition will be showing text-images, digital collages, assemblages, montages and objects.

Maud Tutsche (collage, collaged book cover)
„In my collages, I combine two aspects that are important to me: on the one hand, the critical examination of socio-political issues and, on the other, beauty and aesthetics. For me, the two are interdependent and inseparable.
My examination of social conflicts, disharmony and destruction leads to the search for harmony and beauty, which I want to realise in every work, and collage offers me space for experimentation.
I am particularly interested in the haptics of the different materials. I work with packaging, foils, my own prints, cinema posters, books, stamps, drawings, Japanese papers, Letrasets (letters), materials from my travels and combine all these techniques. The wealth of materials makes my collages sophisticated and unique. Thematically, I am interested in connections in light, form and colour — the seemingly incompatible. It’s about dialogue on all levels.“ © Maud Tutsche

ARATORA (collage with digitised wood and additional modules, assemblage)
“My graphic and painterly works are not bound by tradition, they are a concrete, free path through my individual and complex universe. Everything depicted is to be seen as a unit whose pictorial content is located in both the macro and micro areas. The scale of form and the inner tension of a surface or figure are the most significant elements. Colour has only a limited relationship to form; colour serves the overall compositional experience. In the graphic reduction to basic elements, I develop a consistent response to the sensory overload of our current information and media world. Without renouncing the modern technologies and possibilities of digitalisation in my artistic work.
My five-colour laser printing process with digitised wood and additional modules is a logical development of all artistic tools such as brushes, pencils, etching needles, ink rollers, printing presses etc. with the technical knowledge of the 21st century.“ © ARATORA alias Frank W. Weber

Jürgen Tenz (relief collage, object)
„In addition to graphic art and painting, Jürgen Tenz (1942-2021) was interested in playing with other materials. On bicycle tours through Berlin, he collected materials from scrap yards, in his studio tin cans, battery parts, canvas, corrugated cardboard and printing blocks discarded from letterpress works. From 1997 to 2002, he used all these found objects, combined with emulsion paint and glue, to create sculptural figurations with a three-dimensional effect. He often drew his themes from series of paintings and prints and transformed them into his own colourful impressions in relief collages. His collages thrive on years of preoccupation with music, movement, dance and rhythm, not without his own humour, but also with slight hints of melancholy.
During the same period, Jürgen Tenz created sculptural objects: three-dimensional abstract forms from found objects such as tinplate, wood, canvas, cardboard and paint.“ © Gisela Tenz