Pavel Büchler at Tanya Leighton Berlin
Collage is a technique incorporating the use of pre-existing materials, objects and images attached as part of a two-dimensional surface. Despite occasional usage by earlier artists, this technique is closely associated with 20th-century art, in which it has often served as a correlation with the pace and discontinuity of the modern world. The work shown at the solo exhibition by Pavel Büchler, is a selection of early collages from the 1970s and 80s, containing of scenes, reminiscent of famous historical paintings and combines them with images that are not necessarily connected to each other.
In Rembrandt van Gervex (1980), for example Büchler manipulates the original image, by replacing the central figure in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, which is a dead male body, through a female figure that spreads apart her legs towards the group of men that lean over the table to observe her precisely. It’s a piece that clearly demonstrates that changing single elements in images can lead to completely different meanings, as well as enter a whole level of political dimensions.
The viewer is also confronted with different art movements, such as cubism, as in the piece Socialist Cubism (1908). Cubism seem to serve as a self-referential motif, as the paintings of the early 20th century avant-garde are like painted collages, where objects are analysed, broken-up and reassembled in abstract form, in order to depict a subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.
The way Büchler samples the visual material also provides subtly critical and humorous commentaries on their appropriated imagery. The series Clowns, Acrobats and Others (1986) for example, where each work contains of two images, one showing a clown and his stereotype attributes, and the other showing archive photographs of politicians or African masquerade dancers, that are resemble of these very characteristics.
Images used in Büchlers solo show Back to Work, which is curated by the Belgian art historian Philippe Pirotte, almost are like text, where his approach to collage refers to the visual structure of his source material. Collage here almost becomes a form of writing, by re-staging art historical discourses and juxtaposing them with socio-political moments.
Ever since Büchler produced this group of work, the medium of the collage served as working strategy for him, a strategy forcing an uncritical montage to permit an analytical reading of the subject.
Pavel Büchler
Back to Work
Tanya Leighton, Berlin
- 15.11.2014
Images courtesy Tanja Leighton gallery, Berlin
Melissa Canbaz
