Net-Grid (my dad knows nothing)

2020, Mandy El-Sayegh

Net-Grid (my dad knows nothing) 2020 is a large-scale, unframed painting part of an ongoing series of ‘Net-Grids’ started in 2010. In these paintings El-Sayegh works with silkscreen print directly onto canvas, creating a surface for a layered painting and collage process using found images and text. Overlaying scraps of newsprint from the Financial Times, found objects and silkscreen prints with hand-painted grids, she seeks to examine the pervasive circulation of images and information, as well as the structures that contain them.

Grew Feathers

2016, Lorna Simpson

Grew Feathers 2016 is a medium-scale black and white collage on paper, made using printed paper and a found photograph. Constructed by applying pieces of cut printed paper to a paper support, it depicts a female figure in a white boat-neck top and pearl necklace who sits sideways on, facing towards the left-hand side of the picture plane. The effect of light and shadow on the figure’s skin is conveyed using differently patterned sections of paper, and her hair is formed of small collaged pieces that give the appearance of feathers, hence the work’s title. The face is represented by a single collaged eye which looks out towards the viewer.

Queens and Kings

2017, Zohra Opoku

Queens and Kings continues Opoku’s series WHO IS WEARING MY T-SHIRT, exploring the impact of textile waste in Ghana. Screenprinted onto a patchwork of used fabrics, the composition includes the artist and her siblings standing around piles of garments. With leaves and branches disguising their faces, the figures wear second-hand T-shirts and kente cloth passed down by their father, Asante Chief Nana Opoku Guyabaah II of Asato, Volta Region. Kente cloth is a handwoven fabric made from silk and cotton. It was originally produced to dress kings and their courts and is often worn on special occasions. Opoku’s work explores ‘how various types of dress culture are inspired by different social influences’. Through her fabric combinations, she invites us to consider the ways tradition and globalisation intersect in contemporary Ghana.

Gallery label, June 2023

Dream English Kid, 1964 - 1999 AD

2015, Mark Leckey

Leckey’s interest in the radical effect of technology on popular culture is evident in the video Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD. Memories of the artist’s life are retold through material he found online collaged with footage shot by Leckey. Structured chronologically, moments include the 1964 launch of a satellite balloon into space and the impact of contemporary events via newspaper headlines, radio and television. The work was prompted by Leckey’s discovery of a YouTube video of a Joy Division gig he had attended in 1979. This led him to speculate whether he could compile a collage of his memories. Acting as a form of self-portrait of his early life, the video explores ideas about personal history and collective memory and how the past has been enhanced and amplified in the digital era.

Gallery label, October 2019

Predecessors

2013, Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Predecessors 2013 is a two-part work by the Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby. It is executed in acrylic, charcoal, pencil and acetone-transferred prints on two separate sheets of paper that are displayed unframed and unmounted. The left-hand sheet features a single female figure wearing a pink dress, seated in a domestic living-room environment. The work shows the contrast between a modern ‘off-the-peg’ style interior and the iconographic ‘lattice’ – a geometric structure of cement that was used as a ventilation system, as well as a decorative element – typical of the houses in late 1970s Lagos when the artist was growing up. The female subject at the centre of the composition has consistently appeared in a number of Akunyili Crosby’s previous works. She is the artist’s alter ego, a modern African woman who embodies the nature of the African cosmopolitan lifestyle through her costume, style and mannerisms. She is an ‘Afropolitan’, representative of a new generation of African who exists between multiple geographies and cultures, living a trans-cultural and trans-national life. The concept of Afropolitan was popularised by writer Achille Mbembe (born 1957) in the essay ‘Afropolitanism’, in which he aimed to propose a possible new answer to the question of African identity (in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London 2005, pp.26–9).

You were always on my mind

2007, Wangechi Mutu

Mutu’s elaborate figurative paintings incorporate collaged materials from a variety of sources including medical journals, ethnographic photo-essays, fashion, wildlife and pornographic magazines. In this double profile, the larger, lower, head is mainly in earth tones, and includes collaged images of a begging figure and a jewelled hand. The smaller head is lushly coloured and partly built-up in layers of a moss-like plant substance. The entire construction suggests a conflation between natural and artificial constructions of beauty and plenty.

Gallery label, September 2008

Untitled 17

2006, printed 2020, Sammy Baloji

In Mémoire, Baloji superimposes colonial-era images onto contemporary photographs of mining infrastructure in ruin. Baloji was born in Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Haut-Katanga province. The region is rich in minerals such as copper, cobalt and uranium, and was exploited by Belgian colonial powers, authoritarian governments and private companies for more than a century. Following a decline in the 1990s, the mining industry has returned to meet the global demand for coltan used in electronics manufacturing. Baloji’s photomontages highlight an ongoing history of exploitation, prosperity and decline. In each image Baloji joins two views of the same landscape, a visual metaphor for the spaces and peoples scarred by colonialism and the impact of globalisation. A group of women and children, prisoners in chains, and a labourer hold centre frame. Contemporary figures amid the ruins appear hidden in the landscape.

Gallery label, June 2023

Jane

2006, Raqib Shaw

Shaw has copied Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII, and playfully embellished it with dramatic explosions and animal features. What may appear as a desecration is regarded by Shaw as a homage that emphasises how this historical figure has been supplanted by her iconic portrait. ‘Henry and Holbein have been dead for centuries and so will we pass away, but the symbols remain’, he has said.

Gallery label, September 2008

Bird in Hand

2006, Ellen Gallagher

Sheets of inked and stained pages have been stacked together and densely layered, sometimes twenty sheets deep, the edges and surface cut with a knife to reveal colour striation beneath. The undersea landscape is related to Gallagher’s imaginative exploration of the Middle Passage, the most treacherous part of the slave trading route between Africa and North America. The central figure is a black sailor or pirate with a peg leg. ‘I think of this painting as an origin myth of sorts, with a kind of evil doctor, perhaps related to Doctor Moreau or Frankenstein, at its centre’, Gallagher has said.

Gallery label, September 2008

Los Moscos

2004, Mark Bradford

This large-scale collage includes materials found by the artist on the streets around his studio in Los Angeles, USA. Visually suggestive of aerial maps of sprawling, urban areas, the collage is constructed entirely from paper fragments which, the artist believes, ‘act as memory of things pasted and things past. You can peel away the layers of papers and it’s like reading the streets through the signs’. The work takes its title from a derogatory slang term for migrant day labourers in the San Francisco Bay Area, reflecting the artist’s long-standing interest in the sub-cultures of the inner city.

Gallery label, October 2016

Something Going On Above My Head

1999, Oswaldo Maciá

Something Going On Above My Head brings together over two thousand birdsongs from across the world, arranged like instruments in an orchestra. The artist spent five years collecting birdcalls from audio archives and libraries. He then reworked them into a symphony. Maciá challenges the definition of sculpture as a visual art form. Something Going On Above My Head highlights the amount of information surrounding us, and questions our ability to comprehend this indistinguishable background noise.

Gallery label, April 2021

No Woman, No Cry

1998, Chris Ofili

No Woman No Cry is a tribute to the London teenager Stephen Lawrence who was murdered in a racially motivated attack in 1993. A public inquiry into the murder investigation concluded that the Metropolitan police force was institutionally racist. The woman depicted is Stephen’s mother, Doreen. In each of her tears is a collaged image of Stephen Lawrence’s face, while the words ‘R.I.P. Stephen Lawrence’ are just visible beneath the layers of paint. As well as this specific reference, the artist intended the painting to be read as a universal portrayal of melancholy and grief. Ofili titled the work after the 1974 song by Jamaican musician Bob Marley.

Gallery label, October 2022

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different?

1992, Richard Hamilton

This work is a remake of an image Hamilton originally created in 1956 as part of his contribution to the influential group exhibition This is Tomorrow at Whitechapel Art Gallery. The original work is was one of Hamilton’s most famous images and has become an icon of British Pop art. As part of a 1992 BBC television programme he demonstrated how an artist can use a computer to generate art by recreating the 1956 collage in a way that reflected the 1990s, such as the circuit board wallpaper and caricature of Margaret Thatcher.

Gallery label, September 2018

Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?

1989, Guerrilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group who describe themselves as feminist activist artists. They use facts, humor and visuals to expose gender and racial discrimination in politics, art, film, and popular culture. This poster, highlighting the lack of women artists in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection in New York, was designed as a billboard. It was commissioned by the Public Art Fund in New York but was rejected. The Guerrilla Girls then paid to put it on the side of New York City buses to make sure it would still be seen. Since forming in 1984, Guerilla Girls have been involved in hundreds of projects all over the world. Their identities remain unknown.

Gallery label, July 2020

Freedom and Change

1984, Lubaina Himid CBE RA

Lubaina Himid’s large installation is a celebration of relationships between women. Two Black women run barefoot along a beach, holding their hands high in the air as if about to twirl joyfully. Appearing to trample two white men trapped in the sand, they run towards the future, holding the leads of a pack of snarling dogs. Himid wrote about this work: ‘Made on a “theatre curtain”, it precedes the drama and romance of running away ... without depicting the reality of running away or the consciousness of a sudden departure on those left behind.’

Gallery label, August 2020

Britain Seen from the North

1981, Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg made this work during a visit to Britain in 1981, when he felt that the nation was beset by social and economic difficulties. The figure to the left is a portrait of the artist. Cragg lives in Germany, so although Britain is his native country he was viewing it through the eyes of an outsider.

Typically for Cragg, the work consists of many individual objects, arranged to form a larger image. This has prompted his work to be described as a 'relationship of the part to the whole', an idea derived from particle physics.

Gallery label, August 2004

Untitled

1976, Linder

Linder states: ‘I remember the pure pleasure of photomontage. I had spent three years working with pencil, paint and pen trying to translate my lived experience into made marks. It was a moment of glorious liberation to work simply with a blade, glass and glue … I’d always loved magazines and I had two separate piles. One you might call women’s magazines, fashion, romance, then a pile of men’s mags: cars, DIY, pornography, which again was women, but another side. I wanted to mate the G-Plan kitchens with the pornography, see what strange breed came out. I did it all on a sheet of glass with a scalpel, very clean, like doing a jigsaw.’

Gallery label, November 2023

Pittsburgh Memory

1964, Romare Bearden

Lady with Fruit

1957, Benode Behari Mukherjee

Lady with Fruit 1957 is a paper collage on card that depicts a female figure, seen frontally and positioned in the centre of the almost square composition. She holds a number of brightly coloured items in her hands and lap, and is surrounded by abstract shapes in similarly bold colours, including orange, green, pink, blue and yellow. All of the forms in the composition are made from pieces of cut paper in bright hues that are pasted onto beige-coloured card.

Head of a Man

1956, Nigel Henderson

Nigel Henderson made this work from layered photographs of vegetables, charred logs, stones, leaves, a shoe and a scratched wall. He described it as ‘Out of Nature and into Industry.’ Henderson began by making a smaller collage, which he photographed and enlarged. He then added more photographic cuttings and paint. Finally, he re-photographed and further enlarged the work to create this densely layered image. It was originally shown at the exhibition This is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1956.

Gallery label, September 2023

The Snail

1953, Henri Matisse

After 1948, Henri Matisse was confined to bed due to ill health. Though he could no longer paint, he produced many works by cutting or tearing shapes from paper painted in bright colours. An assistant then pasted the cut-outs on a white sheet following his instructions. Matisse found this technique liberating: ‘Instead of drawing the outline and putting the colour inside it ... I draw straight into the colour.’ Matisse got the idea for this composition while drawing a snail. ‘I became aware of an unrolling, I found an image in my mind purified of the shell, then I took the scissors.’

Gallery label, April 2025

Picture of Spatial Growths - Picture with Two Small Dogs

1920–39, Kurt Schwitters

Schwitters started this assemblage of discarded rubbish and printed ephemera in Germany in 1920. Seventeen years later he brought it with him to Norway, having escaped from Nazi Germany. There he added Norwegian material: theatre tickets, receipts, newspaper cuttings, scraps of lace, and a box with two china dogs. The different layers of collage reflect the artist’s journey into exile.

Gallery label, January 2016

Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper

1913, Pablo Picasso

Picasso first began to make collages in 1912. The use of cut papers, and in particular clippings from newspapers, seemed a natural extension of his earlier experiments with stencilled lettering. Whereas his earlier cubist works had involved deconstructing objects into their component parts, works like this one sought to construct a unified composition from abstracted fragments of the objects depicted. The newspaper in this work may have been chosen for its faded colour, since it was already nearly thirty years old when Picasso used it.

Gallery label, January 2016