Since 1997, Pavel Zoubok Gallery has exhibited the work of contemporary and modern artists with a particular focus in the fields of collage, assemblage and mixed media installation. From the outset, our program has drawn from past and present works in an effort to create a cohesive art historical and commercial context for collage and its related forms, spanning most of the major art movements of the postwar period. While contemporary art has always been the driving force of our program, represented by a diverse group of gallery artists, we also maintain an inventory of works by important proponents of the medium, including Hannelore Baron, Joe Brainard, Joseph Cornell, Al Hansen, Ray Johnson, Jiri Kolar, Robert Motherwell, Mimmo Rotella, Anne Ryan, Jacques Villegle and David Wojnarowicz. Over the years our mission has expanded to include paintings and drawings by artists who embrace a montage, or collage aesthetic. After three exciting years in Soho and three on the Upper East Side, Pavel Zoubok Gallery relocated to a larger street-level space in the heart of Chelsea's thriving art district in 2004. In 2009, Pavel Zoubok Gallery was made a member of the ADAA (Art Dealer's Association of America).
COLLAGE
Perhaps no art form expresses the character of the twentieth century and the contemporary moment with greater clarity and immediacy than collage . Narrowly defined, collage is the construction of images through the deceptively simple act of pasting cut or torn papers. The term derives from the French word coller , meaning to glue, paste, or stick. Collage, however, is much more than a medium for making pictures. It is a mode of perception, a multi-dimensional language with aesthetic implications that span the histories of art, architecture, literature, and music. In the visual arts collage first emerged as a fine art medium in the papier colles , or pasted papers of the Cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Since then, it has played a vital role in almost every phase of Modernism. Its influence is most poignantly reflected in Italian Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art, and Fluxus. Of the many modern masters who worked in collage, however, only a handful can be considered collagists in the fullest sense. Artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Hoch, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, to name but a few, changed the face of Modernism by asserting that art could indeed be made from almost anything. Even the pictorial purity of Abstract Expressionism could not evade the powerful allure of collage. Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Anne Ryan and Robert Goodnough used collage to expand the practice of abstract painting.
From the mid-twentieth century forward artists have continued to use collage to address a wide range of formal and thematic concerns. While the Modernist period saw only a handful of bona-fide collagists, numerous artists working today have made collage (and by extension assemblage and mixed-media installation) their primary medium and continue to explore and extend its boundaries. The evolution of the collage aesthetic has had an equally important effect on contemporary painters who look to it as a conceptual and/or visual model. The incorporation of montage imagery in drawing and painting has helped to redefine what a collage can be, or become.
Collage engages us with an immediacy that is distinct from other mediums. The artist confronts us with a vision of the world that is literally constructed from the physical context of his/her own experience. Found images and objects function as signifiers of both individual and collective experience. By incorporating materials that are inextricably linked to the realities of daily life, the artist establishes an immediate identification, both real and imagined, between the viewer and the work of art. The simplicity of the collage process adds to the sense of immediacy and spontaneity. The basic principle of juxtaposition forms the foundation for an art of limitless associative possibilities. Collage allows the artist to explore simultaneously the mysterious spaces between high art and popular culture, text and image, figuration and abstraction, past and present, two and three-dimensional space.