Charles Wilkin is an artist and beekeeper based in Narrowsburg, New York. Wilkin is one of the artists who propelled collage in the 90s and early 2000s. With Index A, the monograph published by Gestalten in 2003, his personal way of combining found elements, photography, drawing, and handwriting became iconic, turning into a template for a new generation of artists working with found material. But Charles' path did not end here. Rather than repeating what had made him known worldwide, he decided to continue on a personal quest for a form of producing art that connects with his deepest concerns and interests. From there, Wilkin strove to use collage as a means of uncovering the beauty and empathy that lie hidden within us all, revealing intangible aspects of what makes us human. Movement, depth, and a tactile feel are some of the features found in his work, which, despite utilizing vintage imagery, possesses a timeless quality and a highly personal touch. He is one of our all-time favorites, so we caught up with him to discuss his work, life, beekeeping and music.

Leonardo Sousa is a visual artist based in Lisbon, Portugal. After working for many years on wood and iron pieces, moving from his hometown to Lisbon to pursue a master's degree caused Leonardo to change the focus of his practice. Faced with the impossibility of working with the materials with which he had used in the past, he felt the need to look for something new, and in the immediate surroundings, almost by chance, he found collage. From that moment on, his artistic practice and research work focused on investigating what collage is and how it should be understood in the context of contemporary art. Today we will be talking with Leonardo to learn more about his thinking and theoretical studies on collage as a medium. We will review the evolution of the concept and its historical adaptation to new social and cultural landscapes. We will also learn about Leonardo's projects, which include, among others, the creation of a collage dictionary.

David Henry Brown aka David Henry Nobody is a NYC-based artist whose work resists categorisation by the more traditional labels of the art world. Interventionist, Immersive Performer, Social Sculptor or Reality Hacker are some of the ways to describe David's career, who since the early 1990s has developed a highly provocative and political body of work that acts almost as a mirror in which we see reflected the world we live in. Resemblage, the union of the words resemble and collage, is the term Brown has coined to describe the work he has created in recent years where he uses social media to create a living performance. From his Instagram profile David uses his body to attach found objects, discarded items and remnants of our consumer society to create elaborate living collages that confront us with who we are as a society.

Valerie von Meiss is the Zurich born and Berlin based mastermind behind The Curve, the renowned art space and nomadic gallery dedicated to the promotion of contemporary collage. With a fresh approach and a fearless attitude, in 2017 Valerie turned her odd shaped apartment into a gallery to exhibit the work of few artist friends. This was the starting point of a project that grew organically championing contemporary collage and re-thinking traditional art world practices and the relationship between artists and galleries. Today we’re speaking with Valerie to learn more about The Curve’s history, philosophy and curatorial approach. And we also asked her for some tips on how we can start collecting collage if we are passionate about this medium -and don’t have a huge budget.

Omar Barquet is a Mexican artist based in Mexico City. Born in the Caribbean city of Chetumal, Barquet's upbringing, surrounded by wildlife, family, music and the sheer force of nature, made his curiosity a way of relating to the environment, and his childhood, marked by hurricanes, freedom, chaos and joy, a primary source for building his artistic practice. Barquet’s interests cannot be reduced to a single artistic discipline. He is way more than a visual artist. His work includes fragments of poetry, dance, music, performance, painting, sculpture, architecture, jewelry among other fields. His approach to art is deeply influenced by music, and his largest project so far, The Ghost Variations, started in 2012 and still on-going, is organised like a symphony, with different elements interacting in time and space creating something much larger than its separate parts. - This episode includes musical excerpts from : GHOST VARIATIONS 3RD FUGUE / THE SHINING SEQUENCE (After Robert Schumann) Improvisation for Flutes and Saxophone performed in by Ensemble AKA (Marilène Provencher-Leduc + Tommy Davis) Vaivén / Durare. Composed by Fernando Soberanes with the collaboration of Omar Barquet Geistervariationen / 3rd Fugue / The shining sequence (after Robert Schumann) Performed by Faustino Díaz and Ricardo Carvalhoso and Out of Doors, sound performance made by Omar Barquet.

There are few names in the collage scene (if we can speak of a scene, but that's another story) that almost all of us agree belong to the prestigious category of a contemporary classic. John Gall is definitely one of them. Although his main work is related to book cover design (and he’s one of the best doing that), since the mid-2000s John has worked and experimented with collage, developing his own signature style that has been evolving ever since. His exploration with collage has fed back into his design practice and at the same time has generated a parallel path as a visual artist and illustrator.

Michel Lamoller is a Berlin based German artist. His work can be described as three dimensional collage. After growing up with an amateur photographer parent, having the chance to be an intern at Magnum in New York City and going to art school in Hamburg, experimentation and the search for his own artistic voice led Michel to discover how to work with layered images to construct pieces that are located in the imaginary crossroad where photography, sculpture, installations and collage meet. To balance the technical nature of photography, Michel developed a material-based process that allows him to improvise and create always leaving room for the unexpected. Michel is one of those artists who defy the limits of the medium they work with and that is why his work is as difficult to classify as it is fascinating.

TWS Broadcast: S02E06: Pablo Serret de Ena: The Great Explorer. Pablo Serret de Ena is a Spanish Copenhagen based artist. Pablo is a fearless, obsessive, anarchic, restless, poetic, and, above all, curious person. Classifying his work is an almost impossible task, since every time he finishes decoding an artistic discipline, he decides to abandon it in search of new knowledge and adventures. He is an explorer for whom public art, sound installations, drawing, video and short films are just excuses that he uses in order to shape his questions and, if possible, find some tentative answers. Pablo is not a collage artist by any means. He is an artist with a collage mindset, which allows him to stitch together seemingly unconnected areas of reality to create unique artistic pieces. To learn more about Pablo's work, we reviewed with him the particular meaning of these 5 concepts that, in our opinion, are key to his career: Exploration, Error, Sound, Technology, In-between-ness.

China Marks is a New York based artist who hacks machines to create drawings using fabric and thread. Under China’s hand, scraps of patterned fabric come to life, utterly transformed into characters and narratives that reflect the world in all its glory, horror and absurdity. The industrial sewing machine, China’s tool of choice, creates the stitched line which unifies fragments of found fabric into singular works of humor and poetry. China's work is shown in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe, and at the Owen James Gallery in NYC. She has received numerous grants and awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2005, 2011, and 2017, and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2013 and 2021. We visited China’s studio to talk with her about her own story, her work, influences and process. - The Weird Show Broadcast is sponsored by NEW, a project based art collection designed to foster artist collaboration and empower creative expression. To learn more about their program and the artists they work with, go to new collection.com This episode was produced by Máximo Tuja / Max-o-matic Interview by Andrea Burgay Edition and sound design by Matías Rossi Mix and mastered by Adrià Navarro

Catalina Schliebener is a New York based, Chilean born artist. Their mixed media work lives in paper collages, site-specific installations and murals. Childhood is the first layer of meaning that forms around Catalina's practice. But their work is not just about childhood, rather they uses it to explore the concepts of gender, sexuality and class. Informed by their upbringing in a left wing politicized household during Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, their life as an immigrant, Queer theory, a Philosophy degree, a job in early childhood education and their path to find their own identity, Catalina’s work is extremely personal, blending childhood’s playful spirit with a deeper introspective approach that makes us reflect in our own lives and experiences. The Weird Show Broadcast is a podcast about art, context, appropriation, paper, artists, ideas, places, sounds, people, stuff, and, sometimes, collage The Weird Show Broadcast is sponsored by NEW, a project based art collection designed to foster artist collaboration and empower creative expression. To learn more about their program and the artists they work with, go to www.newcollection.com This episode was produced by myself, Máximo Tuja aka Max-o-matic. Edition and sound design by Matías Rossi. Mix and mastered by Adrià Navarro. For further information, feel free to go to theweirdshow.info and find more episodes, interviews and reviews that we’ve been collecting there for the last eleven years.

Diane Meyer is a Los Angeles based artist whose work combines photography and embroidery, creating mixed media objects that questions the idea of memory, our construction of history and our relationship with the past. Her artworks are part photography and part hand-stitched pixelated color patterns that at the same conceal and reveal information, making us think what’s lost and what’s gained in this media translation where a thread takes the place of an image. Diane's work has been exhibited in dozens of galleries in the United States and abroad and is part of important art collections. And while it is not traditional collage, her work has been collected in titles as central to the genre as The Age of Collage, published by Gestalten. And as there is nothing we like more than exploring the boundaries of what we understand as collage, we talked to her to learn more about her work, influences and process. This episode was produced, edited and sound designed with blood, sweat and tears by myself, Máximo Tuja aka Max-o-matic. Mix: Adrià Navarro Original: Matías Rossi (with hacked guitars by Niño Montaña)

Anthony Zinonos was born in South Africa and lived in Cyprus, Greece, the UK and in California and seems that all this moving from place to place made him realise that the less he needed, the easier to move forward. And, inspired by his own life experience and a John Stezaker exhibition he attended when he was still in college, he decided to make restrictions the main tool to shape his artistic identity. After stripping his work of everything superfluous, Anthony began making collages with a single (usually very small) photographic clipping and a piece of colored paper. The “Less is more” ethos… taken to the extreme. Zinonos’ minimal approach to collage conquered the world more than a decade ago, first via social media and then in art exhibitions and working worldwide for very prestigious editorial and commercial clients. So this week we’re talking with Anthony to learn more about his background, work, ideas… and a bit about his famous Pugs. This episode was produced, edited and sound designed by Máximo Tuja aka Max-o-matic. Mixed by Adrià Navarro Original music was composed by Matías Rossi– with a little help from our intern at the music department, Niño Montaña.

James Gallagher is one of our personal heroes. We owe this guy so much.He was one the few artists that in the late 90s and the early 2000’s championed collage in a time that the medium was far from being relevant or popular. His raw and expressive collages featuring intimate scenes with anonymous characters showed the world a new way to speak with a known language. His work showed many of us that collage, made with a contemporary mindset, was as exciting and bold and any other medium could be. His curatorial work carried out in the late 2000’s and early 10s took collage to a new level. With the Cutters New York, Berlin and Cork exhibitions, and in the Cutting Edges book, published by Gestalten, he showcased a selection of artists from all around the world working with appropriation art and collage in new and refreshing ways that inspired the collage renaissance that arrived just few years after. James Gallagher is one of the reasons we do what we do. He had a huge influence in my work as an artist and in the creation of TWS back in 2010. He, in many ways, started all this, and we are glad we finally got to talk to him about everything.

Pelle Cass is a photographer who loves to defy the nature of his own practice.If what photography aims to do is to freeze a small fraction of a second in a single image, what Pelle does is to forget about the limits imposed by time and condense hours of activity into a single photo. Pelle makes, as he calls his method, still time lapses. Imagine a picture of a football field, with few players running around and a thousand balls flying. That’s pure Pelle Cass. Pelle makes magic out of everyday life. He turns facts into art.He makes collages with time which are both real and surreal in a unique way.

Mark Wagner makes art with money. I mean, he literally makes very intricate collages made entirely from deconstructed US dollar bills. His art involves both an extremely precise craft and a highly conceptual approach, exploring with his work the intersection of wealth, power, value and American identity. During his career Mark has destroyed thousands of dollar bills not only to creates art, but also to start conversations and make us think about the nature and role in our life of something that we tend to see as almost natural and given, money.

Andrea is a Brooklyn based artist and editor. Her works combines collage, sculpture and found materials to elevate the overlooked and mundane via transformative physical processes. And, indeed, there’s a strong physical and material component to her work, with layers of paper, paint and other materials accumulating and forming abstract and expressive gestures. Andrea is also the founder and editor or one of our favourite editorial adventures: Cut Me Up magazine, a participatory and curatorial project which publishes works created with artworks made by deconstructing and transforming the previous editions of the magazine. Because we love Andrea’s work and projects, and because she’ll be joining the Weird Show team interviewing her favourite artists, we wanted to talk with her and find out more about her work and ideas.

There are two sides of Mac Premo. Mac the commercial films director that works for huge clients. And Mac, the artist making art stretching the limits of collage like no other. But there’s something in common on both sides : Mac, as he likes to say, is a stuff-maker.  The only thing is that stuff, in Mac’s world, can go from simple paper collages to delicate wood sculptures, films, giant installations, plays -which he writes and performs- and complex perpetual machines.  So, yes, he makes stuff. Beautiful and meaningful stuff in all forms, shapes and mediums.  And, on top of that, he makes us think and reflect on our own existence with the stuff he creates. Today we’re talking with him to find out more about his way of approaching his work and his ideas behind his art.

Based in Dever, Colorado, Mario Zoots in an artist that has been working with collage in its various forms for over a decade. His work is bold and extremely personal, but what we like the most about Mario is his relentless exploration of collage as a medium. While some artists work hard to find a trademark style that they can repeat endlessly, Mario goes just the opposite way. His work is always evolving and looking for new ways to represent his ideas, thoughts and histories. Mario is not afraid of trying new things and shifting his focus to new materials, techniques or conceptual approaches. It seems that the only things he really fears is repetition.

2020 was a year were the fact that black lives matter was sadly highlighted by police brutality and death. In different areas, movements have been created to vindicate the situation of inequality and social injustice. And Black Collagist, an art incubator created as a platform to discover, facilitate and support black artists making collage, is definitely the one that caught our attention the most. In this episode we spoke with writer and curator Teri Henderson, Black Collagists Founder and director, to discover more about the incubator, its mission goals and how does the art world looks for a black curator working in a collage related project.

Since it’s first edition in 2013, the artist Dennis Busch has partnered with the prestigious Berlin based publishing house, Gestalten, to put out the most relevant book series reviewing contemporary collage: The Age of Collage. In this episode we are speaking with Francesca Gavin and Dennis Busch, editors of this series latest release: The Age of Collage 3. Both editors have a very different profile and that’s part of the richness of the book. And that’s what’s great about these interviews. We’ll be facing the Age of Collage from two opposite perspectives and ways of approaching art and collage.