Paste-Ups

Jess’s earliest collages, which he preferred to call “paste-ups” for the association with childlike play, date from 1951. Combining magazine illustrations, comic strips, engravings, Tarot cards, and eventually puzzle pieces, the paste-ups grow more complex with time, the later examples containing hundreds or even thousands of fragments. Visual and verbal puns organize the intricacies, as the viewer’s attention is drawn inward to Jess’s constellations of myth and imagination.

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