frosch&portmann is pleased to announce A Binder Full of Collages, a group exhibition that brings together collages of six artists who have been working in this medium for many years.

Swiss artist Raffaella Chiara is represented with Lichtung, a work from her Am Rande des Bildes series from 2008. Pencil lines extend the contours of a collaged landscape detail beyond the borders of the clipping and thus complete the scenery of this quiet forest glade. While Chiara uses her strong, defined line to emphasize the power and wholeness of nature, Eva Lake’s fragmented faces of unknown beauties play with the concept of incompleteness. The Anonymous Women series is the Portland (OR) based artist’s most recent work; cut-up and taken out of context – busted out of the binder where they’re too often shoved into – Lake puts her women where you least expect them to be: They are the sky, the ocean, the Pantheon, the mirror, the drapery or the carpet you step on.

In his collages, Robert Yoder re-asks the question of desire in terms of aesthetic judgment. Working predominantly with images from high-end lifestyle magazines, the Seattle based artist changes the figure to be more than what it is, to make it abstract, to remove the connotations associated with the figure. The removal of the obvious subject exposes its true object. Both Eva Lake and Robert Yoder use solely scissors and glue in their collages shown here, while Dennis Dawson starts the process of reworking torn out pages of magazines by painting out/over the found images to clear his way. Layer after layer of new imagery is added, leaving out selected parts of the printed material as a palimpsest of its cultural source. While replacing the original content with a new and very personal one, a throwaway mass-media product is being transformed into a kind of a diary. In this new body of work, Dawson asserts his individual voice among the din of cultural clutter. Part of that clutter we are surrounded by daily is noise; Steve Greene, living and working in New York City, likes noise. The imagery of sound is predominant in his recent drawings and collages. Painted black semicircles evoke the pattern of sound waves, their rhythmic crescendo spreading over collaged and drawn images of sound equipment. The artist works with accident and deliberation, always looking for a balance between freedom and control.

James Gallagher is interested in our secret behavior. His collages, pieced- together images from obscure books and discarded magazines, focus on personal space, physical relationships and enigmatic situations. Revealing a hidden world of ugliness, beauty, solitude and desire, Gallagher’s scenes capture that mystic fleeting moment. In his collages, the artist allows the viewer a glimpse through a peephole. James Gallagher is represented with six works of his recent Nicotine series.