Israeli Panorama – Disassembly and Reassembly: The Collage as a Visual Puzzle with Dr. Guy Tal, Art History Researcher and Senior Lecturer at Shenkar
A lecture on collage as visual thinking, as part of the Israeli Panorama series, at the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art. The lecture date was not specified.
Additional Details
Image: Still Life, A Letter Rack
Israeli Panorama
A weekly series of meetings with artists and intellectuals, offering diverse perspectives on Israeli culture and society.
In collaboration with the Department of Israeli Culture, Ramat Gan Municipality
Deconstruction and Reconstruction: The Collage as a Visual Crossword
With Dr. Guy Tal, art historian and senior lecturer at Shenkar
Collage challenged the traditional perception of the work of art as a complete and unified world. Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, and Richard Hamilton combined materials and pieces of paper from different sources in their works—sometimes in response to consumer culture, as social criticism, or out of a desire to challenge “high” art by incorporating everyday and “low” materials.
In the lecture, we will examine collage as a form of visual thinking that moves between spontaneity and planning, order and chaos, and clear meaning and mystery. We will also see that “collage” thinking can be identified even before the invention of modern collage, including in the works of Pieter Bruegel, Arcimboldo, and Hogarth.
Dr. Guy Tal is an art historian and senior lecturer at Shenkar. His research focuses on the figure of the witch in Western art, from the Renaissance to the present day. His articles have appeared in leading international academic journals in 2025–2026, and his book Art and Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy was published by the University of Amsterdam Press. He is currently writing Witches: Magic, Sex, and Fantasy in Western Art from 1500 to the Present, to be published by Reaktion Books.
Alongside his academic work, Tal lectures to the general public in various settings throughout Israel and is a contributor to the successful podcast series The Artists.
Image credit: Edwaert Collier, Still Life: A Letter Rack, 1692, oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts.
All information is subject to change.
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