Hannah Hoch's work is instantly recognisable from her hotchpotch of surreal cut-outs and 

photomontages. Part of the Berlin Dadaist movement in the 1920’s, she was barely acknowledged by the art world, however, her work reflected great social change. Her unconventional approach to art made her a trailblazer of appropriation and the original punk of pictures.

 

She cut and spliced images from popular magazines, fashion imagery, natural history books and illustrated journals. Mixing gender, race and cultures, Hoch formed new and exotic tribes of strange beings, collaging together body parts of dancers, naked starlets and close ups of animals. Her disorientating style leading you into a dream-like universe; where you might find the head of a monkey, the legs of a gymnast, a mouth and an eye from two different faces and you have an idea of what Hoch could conjure up. Her amusing and surprising visual language was loaded with political satire. Hybrid anthropomorphic creatures, collided and floundered with recurring themes such as African masks, animals, body parts, wings and fragments of architectural structures.

 

There is no doubt that Hoch’s work has relevance today, influencing current artists such as John Stezaker, Jan Dziaczkowski and Geoffrey Farmer. Each stamping their own modern day take on appropriation and the cut-out. It is her distortion and disfiguration of playful and humorous narratives that lures me into her world and I would like to take this technique further and combine with sculpture and more abstracted pieces, to create a whole new style of my own.