COLLAGES
Talk with Lucie Gorzolka, Timm Rautert and Berit Schneidereit
Fri, 17 October, 7 p.m.

 

As part of the exhibition Sebastian Fritzsch: Sleep. Portrait and Souvenirs.

Free admission
Doors open: 6:30 p.m.
Start: 7 p.m.
Language: German

The term collage refers both to an artistic technique and to the resulting work. The word comes from the French expression papiers collés – a method in which pieces of paper are glued onto a wide variety of surfaces. Collage became particularly well known at the beginning of the 20th century, when artists such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso turned it into an artistic revolution. Today, it is impossible to imagine contemporary art without it.

But what role does the technique still play in the visual arts and photography today? In this talk, three generations who use collage in very different ways engage in conversation. While Timm Rautert was already experimenting with collage in the late 1960s to explore the limits of the photographic medium, Berit Schneidereit redefines the technique to create other pictorial spaces. Just a few months ago, Lucie Gorzolka presented collages at her graduation exhibition at the Düsseldorf Academy that took a completely new approach to questions of order(s).

Are collages disruptions or expansions? What traditions can be traced in the history of art for the technique of collage? What interaction develops between the photographic source material and the artistic interventions?

Together with our guests, we want to discuss these questions and pay homage to collage.

Talk guests: Lucie Gorzolka, Timm Rautert, Berit Schneidereit, Sebastian Fritzsch
Moderation: Timo Schmidt, Meike Eiberger

Lucie Gorzolka, born in Mönchengladbach in 1997, studied painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. In 2025, she completed her studies as a master student of Prof. Thomas Scheibitz. Her artistic practice began in painting, but over time it has expanded to include film and collage. She is interested in the dialogue between these mediums, exploring how images and narratives can be fragmented, layered, and reassembled to create new ways of seeing. Gorzolkas works oscillate between personal and the collective memory, reflecting on recollection, transformation, and the spaces where different perspectives overlap.

Timm Rautert was born in Tuchel, West Prussia, in 1941. He studied photography from 1966 to 1971 at the Folkwang School of Design in Essen under Otto Steinert. In 1971, he received the school's Folkwang Prize for the best diploma of his year. His training in photography and art was preceded by a study of lithography at the summer academy founded by Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg in 1965. While still a student, he began his first experiments with the medium of photography, which he completed in 1974. With trips to New York in 1969 and Japan in 1970, he began an intensive exploration of documentary and journalistic photography. Numerous publications in national and international magazines. From the 1980s onwards, he increasingly focused on longer-term themes, which culminated in book and exhibition projects. From 1993 to 2008, he was professor of photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. In 2008, Timm Rautert became the first photographer to receive the Lovis Corinth Prize for his life's work. In 2021, the Museum Folkwang is honoring one of the most important contemporary German photographers and his photographic and artistic work with a major retrospective.

In the works of Berit Schneidereit (*1988, Frankfurt am Main, DE), the medium becomes a surface for reflection that considers seeing not only in the sense of understanding but also as a visual exploration, as something tactile. She works with various techniques of expanded photography, such as direct exposure on light-sensitive surfaces, to explore our perception and the relationship of the medium to space. To this end, she sometimes formulates questions about the relationship between humans and nature: images of a tamed and (art) historically shaped nature in urban parks and gardens are juxtaposed with overgrown, wild areas. She studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she graduated in 2017 as a master student of Andreas Gursky. Recent exhibitions include the G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Centre Photographie Genève, Geneva, and TICK TACK, Antwerp. She lives and works in Düsseldorf.

 

Image:
Timm Rautert, Ohne Titel, 2024, adS Dots always work