Lightness and conviction: The wonderful collages by Miriam Tölke

She literally carries her head in the clouds, because above the tip of her nose her eyes are pasted over by a piece of sky crossed by a single bird. “The Curve” is the name of the small collage from 2022, in which the flight path of the bird enters into an exciting relationship with the sloping shadow neck line of the female breast piece. From just a few elements, Miriam Tölke has created a poetic world between “dream and reality” in her collages over the past five years, as the title of her first solo exhibition at Johanna Breede goes.

The image sections, each with its own contemporary color, come from old magazines, books and newspapers from the 1960s to 1990s and from the pre-war period. Only the time of the Third Reich is deliberately left out as a contaminated image source of inhumanity. Mostly in black and white with occasional color accents and no larger than the format of the template, collages of great calm, lightness and clarity are created. Almost floating, the image sections, which are glued in only a few places, regain some of the liveliness of the third dimension. It is a play with time, in which two worlds of motifs and images meet without fear of beauty: depictions of women and nature.

Sometimes they combine to form a kind of metamorphosis, sometimes they collide like alien worlds, touch and thwart, experience and endure each other. In contrast to Hannah Höch, however, the meeting of foreign worlds in Miriam Tölke’s collage has less of a Dadaistic-political dimension and more of a surrealistic-poetic dimension. One immediately wants to translate works like “Foundling” from 2020, in which a dark surface of water causes the right half of the woman’s head to burst like a monolith, into a poem that could read: “He occupies her brain as solid as granite / nests in in the gaping forehead / Has she found him? Was it he who found her? / It remains unknowable who bound whom.”

Almost unknown, but 17,000 followers on Instagram

In some collages like this one, the imagery is so coherent that the artist has also produced high-quality editions in very small numbers. She experiments with different papers, formats and reproduction techniques, such as the Achival pigment print on wafer-thin Japan paper or the Toyobo print on handmade Kochi paper, in which the yellowing of the original collage has to be colored by hand so that basically unique pieces are created again. Irrespective of the question of original or edition, Tölke’s collages, just like Hannah Höch’s, show their own artistic signature, which raises questions about their origin and intention. Who is this still largely unknown artist who, after a first solo exhibition in the Bilderhalle gallery in Amsterdam in the summer of 2022, is now having her first solo appearance in Germany, although she already has 17,700 followers on Instagram?

Born in Bielefeld in 1977, Miriam Tölke began studying painting before graduating from school thanks to a talent test at the Art Academy in Stuttgart, before moving to Berlin in 2001. By using found materials, she not only made a virtue of financial hardship from the outset, but also always worked out of an awareness of sustainability and recycling, which, in contrast to the glamorous world of illusion of the magazines, is rooted in an anthroposophical origin. A mental process of deconstruction, transformation and reincarnation can also be seen in her cutting and reassembling, which tries to give back something of the nature of the women in the magazine that are on display. This succeeds as lightly and convincingly as is part of the essence of art.

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