A recent Pinterest mailing included a board devoted to the Aberrant Art collages of Barry Kite — this because I posted on them a while back (on 11/30/16 in “Poet in Search of His Moose”). Six of them in that earlier posting, now four more I’ve chosen from those in the Pinterest mailing. They range from relatively simple compositions to an enormously complex one. But like the collages I posted about last year, they’re zany educations in art and popular culture, packed with astonishing juxtapositions of images.
The four collages:
(#1) Artists Frida Kaho, Diego Rivera, and Andrew Wyeth; discussion below
(#2) Abraham Lincoln parks his bicycle among Union dead at Gettysburg (background photo by Gibson Gardner)
(#3) A therapy group assembled from diverse sources
(#4) An enormous wave of images of girls and women
Kite freely mixes clippings from ads, magazine stories, and other such sources in which figures from capital-A Art. Even he can’t always say where particular images came from.
In any case, back to #1. The background image is Andrew Wyeth’s famous 1948 painting “Christina’s World”. Superimposed on that is a stunning blue Aston-Martin convertible [note 8/14: probably Austin Healey; see the comments below] from (roughly) the 1960s — presumably from a clipping — holding a barking Doberman Pinscher (image source uncertain) and an image of Frida Kahlo. Superimposed on that are images of Diego Rivera and the central figure in one of Wyeth’s Helga portraits. And superimposed on that, in the foreground, is an image of road maps (probably from a clipping).
Seven component parts (“Christina’s World”, the car, the dog, Frida, Diego, Helga, and the roadmaps), really very simple. Collage #2 is even simpler, with only four components (the Gardner photo, Lincoln, the bicycle, and the sign).
Collage #3 is more complex, and #4 is ridiculously more complex.
Simple or complex, they’re about absurd juxtapositions.
[Added 8/14: One more Kite collage, another wave of female figures:
(#5)]
August 14, 2017 at 3:20 am |
I’m going out on a rung here, invite suggestions of anal retentiveness (not the first time) and saying that’s an Austin Healey and not an Aston Martin. Both British and both with names that scan similarly!
August 14, 2017 at 3:38 am |
Ah, and their hood symbols are very similar. It was the symbol that led me to Aston-Martin. But looking at more of the cars, I think you’re probably right about Austin Healey.