'What kind of glue did they use?': Todd Colby Reviews Ashbery and Maddin Exibition

Take a cool, breezy tour through the latest Tibor de Nagy exhibition, consisting of collages by John Ashbery and Guy Maddin, with your guide Todd Colby. Over at Fanzine, Colby walks us through the show:

In his poems, John Ashbery is a master of taking familiar phrases from popular culture, inserting them into his poems, and giving them a new life in a different context. That same knack for culling the familiar is seen in his collages with images of Jerry Lewis, Morris the Cat, Beethoven, and the Pennsylvania Dutch Boy. There is a seat-of-the-pants spontaneity to his choices, and the results are a humorous alchemy of images.

Guy Maddin brings the same frantic elegance of his films to his collages. Many of these pieces feel like they could be panels from his storyboards. Like his films, Maddin’s collages have a sense of lurking surprise and a mischievous undertone. Almost all the collages in this show evoke some form of playful disorientation. Our view changes dramatically from what we see initially to what we see when we move closer to each piece, like optical illusions.

These two artists, each of whom has made a name for himself, to put it lightly, pursuing other art forms (poetry and film), have individually created a joyful body of work that is as generous and welcoming as it is surprising and funny. Ashbery and Maddin take the familiar and twist it just enough to nudge us into bemusement and disorientation.

Colby goes on to look at individual collages, including Ashbery's Strawberry Bed (featured at top) that "looks like a hotel room a bourgeois couple would check into for an erotic tryst in the 1970s." Cool. He then sums up the experience of the exhibition: "Just as the very best stage performers know how important it is to leave the stage with the audience still wanting more, the best collagists know when a work is finished. Ashbery and Maddin are masters of knowing when to stop. Nothing in this show is overwrought or strident." Savor the full review at Fanzine.

If you're in New York be sure to check out the show, which closes on July 31st, at Tibor de Nagy.