TWS News — Transformative gestures
A new studio visit, remembering an amazing project combining collage and sculpture and an update from our gallery.
Collage goes beyond technique and sourcing materials. It requires the disposition to connect the unthinkable. In this issue, we foresee the possibilities of transforming what might be considered “simple” objects into treasures, or the unutterable memories of childhood into big-scale pieces of art. Omar Barquet offered us an invitation to rethink the scope of our gaze and the capacity of our creativity to alchemize the ordinary. And as Ashkan Honarvar’s personal definition of collage is alchemy “a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination,” we are delighted to remind you about his mindblowing art toy VENUS, which starts with analogue collage based on childhood memories and ends up in a sculptural toy.
New on TWS: Omar Barquet. The alchemy of transformative gestures
Omar Barquet is a multidisciplinary artist from Mexico who creates a personal symbolic language in dialogue with the work of poets and musicians. His interest in sound, space, and landscape is intertwined in his complex body of work.
In this issue, he shares with us his tentacular form of experimentation across disciplines, in an audiovisual journey of self/world-discovery linked to memory, solidarity in times of crisis, the conquest of fear, and authenticity. The essence of it all is to alchemize chaos into order while playing with the rules of his own game.
“I often tell people who work with collage: always play, but constantly ask yourself, what are the rules of your game? How are you playing? What are you playing with? Because you can stretch the game within those rules. And then ask yourself, how can you reconfigure them? In other words, you are making variations of your own work. It took me years to discover and understand this.”
From the archive: Ashkan Honarvar. Paper collages that melt into sculptural toys.
In 2021 Ashkan shared with us the beginning of his semi-autobiographical project about his childhood in Iran during the Iran-Irak war. By then he had started the creation of a fictional family as art toys, a family that was inspired partly by folklore, ghost stories, and also his own childhood. The family was completed by 2024, and we are overly rejoiced to see how weird it got and how collage is truly infinite in its possibilities and variations.
This is a perfect example of that old saying: the world is your oyster.
New at TWS Gallery: TWS Editions: 01-06
Last week we launched our first TWS Editions with six artists who’ve been with The Weird Show since the beginning: James Gallagher, Fred Free, Cless, Charles Wilkin, Rubén B, and our own Max-o-matic.
Each presents new limited-edition prints that show why they’re essential voices in contemporary collage—artists whose work has shaped our vision of what collage can be.
Below: Charles Wilkin, The Listless Cyst Between Beauty and Brutality
Stay Weird
Don’t miss our next feature!
It will render some weird and fabulous ideas.
Our family at TWS keeps growing on, we are glad you are part of it. Thank you!
— The Weird Show
Fascinated to discover TWS.
Longtime collagist here, keen to watch and learn. I am, by chance, a solitary visionary at the moment