Surrealist artist Ewa Look creates surreal collages combining absurdity and humor.
Surrealist artist Ewa Look centers her work around collage portraiture, creating artworks out of magazines, books, street posters, and whatever she can get her hands on. The London-based multimedia artist also works with illustration, photography, and animation.
“Collages are central for me, but also extremely frustrating because the process of their composition involves assembly which follows its own timeline and its own logic,” Look tells Mission in an email interview. Channeling creativity and imagination, Look finds the freedom to experiment using the old to create the new.
She sees surrealism and humor most abundant in this world and chooses to focus her collages on just that. Look is somewhat of a nomad, having lived a portion of life on the road. As such, she finds inspiration in everything she sees. “There is a dynamic interplay between real-life —faces, expressions, clothes, scenes— and media representations. My collages are part what I see in social encounters, part what I see in magazines, and so on,” says Look.
But that’s not to say traveling doesn’t come with its challenges. With scarce supplies, lousy working conditions, distractions, and uncertainties, Look has learned to take the good with the bad. Not to mention that paper and glue are not like two peas in a pod. Quite the opposite; Look notes that getting the two to work together can be difficult.
Just as Look pulls from found items, so did renowned Cubist artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque over a century ago when they created the first ever collages. Braque’s 1912 Fruit Dish and Glass utilized cut-and-pasted wallpaper, and in the same year, Picasso produced Still Life with Chair Caning using cloth and rope, causing a turning point in the Cubism era. Look’s modern take on collage gives the century-old art form a modern-day flare.
Look breathes life into her handmade portraits by giving many of them a name and story: Valentina left a friend’s party and got stuck in an elevator, while Jana grabbed a cup of coffee and blue donut from a bakery when the woman serving her spilled some family secrets. Look even utilizes digital animation to bring them further to life. “Why not? The first step of animation was actually verbal, the little stories I began to compose for some of the portraits. To sort of gif-ify some of them, visual animation seemed like a natural step,” says Look.
Recently, Look took to Instagram to explain that her collages are available for purchase, but she’s about to take a hiatus from the technique. In the meantime, she hopes her work inspires people to live as we are. “People are performances. We are surreal,” she explains.
Images courtesy of Ewa Look.
