Found Objects
Everyday or natural things, used with little alteration, that become art through selection, placement or combination.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Found Objects are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
A found object is something the artist did not make: a bicycle wheel, a branch of driftwood, a shop-bought shovel, a stone. The creative act lies in choosing it and changing its context. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque glued newspaper and wallpaper into Cubist collages from 1912, and Marcel Duchamp's readymades of 1913–17 went further, presenting manufactured items with almost no intervention.
Surrealists prized strange encounters with objects, as in Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined cup, saucer and spoon, Object (1936). After 1945 the approach spread widely. Louise Nevelson built walls from scavenged wooden fragments, Marcel Broodthaers used mussel shells and eggshells, and Haim Steinbach has arranged store-bought goods on laminated shelves since the 1980s. The Ghanaian-born, Nigeria-based artist El Anatsui stitches bottle tops and metal seals into shimmering hangings. Look for the object's former use and how its new setting shifts what it means.
