Collage/Assemblage

Carol Rama, Bricolage  1968

Bricolage 1968 is a work on Masonite with collaged elements by the Italian artist Carol Rama. It is thickly painted with brown, yellow, red and black paint, with four groupings of dolls’ eyes embedded in the surface. It measures 700 by 600 millimetres, a size which is consistent with that of Rama’s other works of this period. It was made in Turin and is signed and dated in the lower left corner. The title is a French word for something that has been constructed from a diverse range of objects and materials.

Juan Gris, The Sunblind  1914

Light slips through a venetian blind, casting a shadow from the wine glass onto the small table. The illusionistic appearance of the blind contrasts with the real newspaper, which Gris incorporated into the work. Le Socialiste des Pyrénées-Orientales was local to Collioure, a fishing town where he stayed in the summer of 1914. Gris may have included it to express his political allegiances.

Gallery label, January 2016

Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé, Jazzmen  1961

This work is made from posters and advertisements stripped from a street in Paris. Villeglé presented torn posters as artworks by hanging them on gallery walls, after only minor adjustments. He wanted to channel the spontaneous actions of the anonymous passer-by, seeing the process of tearing off posters as a kind of street art. Villeglé started making works using torn posters in the late 1940s and first exhibited them in 1957. The title of this work comes from the partially torn image of the guitarists on the left-hand side.

Gallery label, February 2026

Kurt Schwitters, (Relief in Relief)  c.1942–5

Schwitters was associated with the irreverent dada movement in 1920s Germany. He developed idiosyncratic forms of collage that combined the discarded ephemera of everyday life such as bus tickets and labels with other materials, coining the nonsense term Merz to describe his technique.Schwitters left Germany in the 1930s, arriving in Britain via Norway and spending over a year in internment camps before moving in 1941 to London, where he made this work. Schwitters often took months over his constructions, searching for appropriate elements.

Gallery label, September 2016

Frida Orupabo, Little Devil  2022

Orupabo made this collage by cutting out photographic prints of images she found online. She then assembled the figures with metal pins, like paper dolls with moving parts. The ‘little devil’ is inspired by depictions of demonic creatures in religious art from the past. The face of the female figure combines images of a white actress and an anonymous Black woman. This constructed image reflects Orupabo’s Christian upbringing alongside the pressures and isolation she felt as a Black woman living in Norway.

Gallery label, February 2026

Joan Miró, The Tightrope Walker  1970

Miró often used discarded materials, some of them discovered in the foundry. His aim was to create what he called an ‘unlikely marriage of recognisable forms’. The body of the tightrope walker is made from a child's doll, cast into bronze. The base on which it rests is the cone through which the bronze was poured, while the nails originally held the mould together. The mottled and textured surface results from acid deposits left by the casting process. Each of these elements has an expressive role within the sculpture which, like much of Miró's work, combines humour with suggestions of violence.

Gallery label, July 2013

Romare Bearden, Mysteries II  1964