Karel Teige

Book covers

Karel Teige exploited the physicality of collage as a medium to superb effect: with scissors and glue he constructs poetic reality as a concrete visual image. Photographic snippets of the real world are extracted from their original contexts and rebuilt into a dreamscape of absurd juxtaposition. Teige’s photo-collages have an authority that would be difficult to achieve in painting. He exploits the human belief in the photographic image to make his surreal assemblages plausible on a certain level, as this is important in creating something convincingly imaginary…

Collage Number 196

Dreams and Disillusions

Dada came to fascinate several of the key Czech cultural theorists and artists of the time – including the hugely influential Karel Teige, who wrote at some length on the subject. Czechoslovakia had only just come into being, and was keen to embrace the new. There is plenty to link it to Dada, sometimes in unexpected and indirect ways. For all this, Dada itself never really caught on in this country and always remained marginal, while many other "-isms" took hold…