Assemblage
Three-dimensional art built by combining found or manufactured objects that keep much of their original identity.
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About
Assemblage is collage extended into space. Instead of carving or modelling, the artist gathers things from ordinary life, such as boxes, bottles, scrap wood and machine parts, and joins them into a new whole in which each part still recognisably belongs to its old life. Pablo Picasso's sheet-metal Guitar (1914) opened the path, and Kurt Schwitters built his Merzbau in Hanover from the 1920s out of discarded materials.
The approach flourished in the 1950s and 60s, when artists across Europe and America made junk and debris their medium. Louise Nevelson stacked painted wooden crates and fragments into black walls, Edward Kienholz built grim tableaux from furniture and mannequins, and Arman filled vitrines with accumulations of identical objects. In Los Angeles, Betye Saar recast racist memorabilia in The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). Look for how the objects retain their histories while taking on new meanings.
