A coincidence of collage: Peter Kennard and Anne Desmet

Anne Desmet, Out of this World and Peter Kennard, The Climate © The artists.

Collage makes you see differently: not only the images so combined, but also the outside world of which those images speak. A serendipitous combination of exhibition visits brought this conclusion forcibly home to me today, as I managed to squeeze into the last few days of shows by both Peter Kennard and Anne Desmet. Both artists work I have known and admired for some time, but both of which I saw and appreciated from new perspectives.

Peter Kennard has been working in photomontage (collage of photographs) since the 1970s. ‘Archives of Dissent’ at the Whitechapel brings together works from the subsequent decades, building to new installations for the exhibition that respond to the previous function of the building’s upstairs galleries as the Whitechapel Library. His work is deeply political. As he explains for the show, it ‘erupts from outrage at the fact that the search for financial profit rules every nook and cranny of our society’. His work expresses that through ‘cutting, tearing, montaging and juxtaposing imagery that we are all bombarded with daily’.

Kennard’s early work was produced as images to accompany newspaper articles, with a number of these publications displayed on lecterns in the new installation ‘The People’s University of the East End’ (using the colloquial name for the former library). He combines images to produce incisive commentary on contemporary events, from the cold war to the climate crisis. I had not previously appreciated that his early works themselves featured in newspapers. Today, I appreciated how both the use of and presentation as mass-consumed imagery made me look differently at every such image that I subsequently saw, as well as the objects, famous figures, locations, symbols combined in his work.

Anne Desmet is a printmaker who works in wood engraving. Her work particularly draws on urban scenes, including cityscapes of London, Rome, Oxford and Bath. During the 2020 pandemic, she turned to collage, working early proofs of her prints into extraordinarily compelling collages using the patterns of a kaleidoscope. ‘Kaleidoscope London’ at the Guildhall Art Gallery brings together series of collages, and original prints focused on the city, also showing her technique through original woodblocks and tools. Some entirely abstract, some building into recognisable patterns, or parts of representational scenes, the ‘kaleidoscopes’ are displayed alongside the original prints, inviting you to look closely, pick apart and decode the imagery. So, in a very different way, does Kennard.

Here, again, the act of cutting up and rearranging the original prints, draws you to look at the objects themselves afresh: the printed lines, variations of colour, textures of paper. I found myself drawn to the neat cut edges and the change of image across each kaleidoscope divide. So too, in taking representations of buildings and scenes, fragmenting and reassembling them, Desmet leads you to focus on the formal details of the buildings in broken and reimagined ways. I found myself looking differently at the re-assembled nature of London itself when I emerged, at the historic and contemporary architectures fitted around and into each other in the city’s streets.

In a city like London, we are fortunate to have so much superb art on our doorstep that it allows these kinds of unexpected exhibition combinations and lessons in looking. From both Kennard and Desmet, through very different imagery, media and messages, we learn to look anew at both object and subject.