Pop culture in fragments

Last year, the Paris Collage Collective held an open call for its art event BAM – Festival of Pop Culture, which ran from October to November. For a special exhibition entitled Collages & Pop Culture at the Centre Anim Rachid Taha in Paris, 50 works that were shown at BAM were selected from over 500 international submissions. The special exhibition ran from January 6 to 31 and has now been extended until February 28, with some of the works replaced. Hommage à Gene Kelly (An American in Paris), a digital collage by Chris Wehrmann, will be on display throughout the exhibition.

The collage is based on Wehrmann's own experiences in ballet and modern dance, as well as his appreciation for the film An American in Paris (1951) starring Gene Kelly. For the artist, Kelly symbolized carefree, elegant, and skillful dance; with its artistic and scenographic design, the film was an influential work for Wehrmann's collage, in which individual elements and architectural milestones from France and the USA merge into a unified whole.

The artist, who lives in Kaarst near Düsseldorf, creates both digital and analog collages and paintings. His works have been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Germany and the Netherlands. In addition to dance and ballet, photography, artworks, theater, nature, and travel experiences also influence his work, in which he captures his own perspective on the universal and the complexity of life—and brings hidden beauty to light.