VIENNA.- The exhibition at the Lower Belvedere pays tribute to one of German modernism’s key figures from the 1920s, an artist whose influence extended far beyond this period. Hannah Höch (1889–1978) was one of the inventors of collage and photomontage. Armed with scissors and glue, she explored the power and impact of images with an ironic and incisive gaze.

General Director Stella Rollig: Hannah Höch was the only woman to hold her own in the circle of Berlin Dadaists—an innovative artist, astute observer, and a political mind. A century after she created her groundbreaking works, Höch is now the artist of the hour. We are delighted about our collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee, making it possible to present a detailed picture of Höch for the first time in Austria.

The exhibition focuses on the montages in which, like in film, Hannah Höch optically and mechanically divided up the world into clips and cuttings, which she reassembled into pictorial narratives that engender new visual experiences. Höch was one of the first artists to explore the power of images in daily life and to engage with the media as a subject of art. In this way she was a pioneer of today’s contemporary art with its critical approach to the media.

Curator Martin Waldmeier: Hannah Höch spent her life perfecting the technique of photomontage, which she had developed in the 1920s, creating an oeuvre that is unmistakable in the history of art. Despite her pioneering achievements, she was only recognized much later. Yet there are few artists from the 1920s who still hold such a fascination for the art of the twenty-first century. By choosing modern society’s everyday visual culture as her subject and using her images to arrange and comment on the world of the media, Höch remains very current today.

The exhibition features eighty of Hannah Höch’s photomontages in addition to a selection of paintings, drawings, prints, and archival material from the artist’s estate. These works are placed in a dialogue with films that inspired Höch, including works by Hans Richter, László Moholy-Nagy, Viking Eggeling, Jan Cornelis Mol, Alexander Dovzhenko, Dziga Vertov, Fernand Léger, and Paul Painlevé.