05.11.2017-07.08.2017
The Magnificient obsession - The Last Ones
Collages par Joanna Blanquart-White
Joanna was born in London in 1938 and lives in Geneva since 1961, between 1969 and 1972 she lived in California.
When it comes to her collages Joanna expresses herself this way:
“Everything started in California in 1972 at the occasion of the ten years of the death of Marilyn. I simply started cutting out photographs of her and keeping them aside, without really knowing why.
Back in Europe, One day...I cut and pasted these photographs; this is how I made my first collage «Hommage».
And then in the mid 80’s, I started to cut and paste again and I made one or two more collages. As time went by Marilyn became my palette, my paint brush, the colour and the form.
Well after that, in the years 2000, I started cutting; not only around Marilyn’s silhouette, as I had done up until then. But rather through her; creating this way, a multitude of little pieces. What reason for this change? I do not know.
Someone asked me once, why I was always cutting in straight lines? I answered “she is the curves”.
Meanwhile she, Marilyn has become an Icon. We are thousands to have photographed, painted, narrated, cut and pasted her. It’s as if she wasn’t dead.
At the end of my very first Exhibit at the Patrick Gutknecht gallery in 2012, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe and the fortieth year of my collages. I thought the “Obsession” finished. On the contrary, it continued and my creativity intensified and every year since then a few pieces are born and join my collection.
In the beginning through Marilyn I “painted” my times, the fifties and sixties, our films, our stars, Kennedy, ... latter, to me she became all women ; I tried to represent her; I wanted to tell «Herstory», with our joys, our pains, our hopes, “the said and the not said”; the truth and the lies.
My very last collage is even called “The Last”, but will it be? I am asked, I ask my self... And then... there! “She” is already not the last...
Not being really an “artist”; knowing neither to draw nor to paint norto sculpt
“I cut & paste”
Joanna Blanquart White, Mai 2017