Overlapping paper scraps in beige and purple

Paper does everything here. Cut and torn pieces are pasted one across the next, some square-edged and some ragged, and the colour range is confined to beige, purple and green. The interest lies in how the fragments meet — the angles they make, the way one edge interrupts another — rather than in anything they once said in print. Layers crowd the surface with little bare ground left showing.

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) was a German artist who built an entire practice from what other people threw away. From 1919 he gave the name Merz to his collages and assemblages, composing tram tickets, wrappers, printed scraps and worn paper into taut abstract structures, and extending the idea into poetry, typography and the architectural Merzbau in his Hanover house. Close to Dada without ever formally joining it, he was condemned as degenerate by the Nazi regime and fled in 1937 to Norway and then to Britain, where he died in Kendal. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, Tate and the Sprengel Museum Hannover.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.