Sunday Art Dialogue: Reassembling the World

This week's Sunday Art Dialogue explores the captivating collage works of British artist Richard Crooks

Collage, from the French coller meaning "to glue," emerged as a revolutionary artistic technique in the early twentieth century. It is widely credited to the pioneering experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who began incorporating fragments of newspapers, wallpaper and found materials into their Cubist paintings around 1912. Their radical approach challenged the traditional boundaries of painting, transforming everyday materials into works of art.

Later, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton, and Joseph Cornell expanded the medium in highly individual ways, combining photography, printed imagery, personal objects and memory to create richly layered narratives.

Richard Crooks' collages, produced during his residencies at Gallery Mcube in Kathmandu and KCAC in Nepal, reflect this rich tradition while responding directly to the landscapes, architecture, visual culture and everyday life he encountered there. His works invite us to consider how fragments-of images, memories, textures and places-can be assembled into new visual stories that are at once personal and universal.

'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder'

126 cm × 6cm

Mixed media analogue collage. Concrete, re-bar, photographs, hand made paper, acrylic found objects

'Materials for these works are from ephemera I collected locally and transformed into paper pulp. Some of this pulp is pressed into bricks, capturing textures in a three-dimensional printed record. This process mirrors the building methods found throughout the valley-formers are crafted, concrete is poured, and, inevitably, a few leaks appear, echoing the inevitable leaks across this new cityscape!'

Join us as we look closely at this remarkable work and explore how collage continues to reinvent the way artists see and interpret the world.