Kurt Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948)

Kurt Schwitters was a German artist born in Hanover, Germany. He worked across a range of media and styles: Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic, typography and installation art.

Schwitters began his career as a post-impressionist but in 1918 his style drastically changed due to the economic, political, and military collapse of Germany at the end of WW1. Schwitters began to make collages, his most famous works being Merz Pictures.

“Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of fragments; and this is Merz”

His Merz collages have been called ‘Psychological Collage’ as the artworks attempted to make sense of the collapsing world around him using fragments and found objects. Schwitters used paint, test prints from his graphic designs, bus tickets, wire, newsprint, ephemera, wood, cardboard, trash, found objects and in his later works pop mass media images. Fragments of his works often alluded to current events and through the act of combining broken fragments together into one form he was, in effect, re-imagining a fractured world. His works were born from the rubble left by the war and highlight how art can be made from destruction.

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