Ivan Chermayeff Collages

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Presented here in a bold oversize format are 27 collages by artist and graphic designer Chermayeff. Using bits of paper, scribblings and drawings by his son Sam, carbon from airline tickets and pieces of mail from all over the world, Chermayeff fashions images that are both refreshingly ingenuous and engagingly complex. Although the collages remind the viewer of the crude art of children, the materials refer to specific people, events and cultures, giving each work a multilayered meaning. In the lovely Innocent Japanese Person , the open arrangement of shapes on a letter lends a sense of naivete to Chermayeff's representation; the return address brings to mind an actual person, perhaps a friend of the artist, this phrase doesn't fit or the sentence doesn't make sense to me. Try breaking it up? aa and the Oriental calligraphy on a mailing label gives the piece a pervasively Asian quality. The artist's affection for or `sensitivity for'? aa the discarded scraps of our ordinary lives is everywhere in evidence, from the fringe of wool samples used as a cap in African with Brian's Note , to a piece of vine posing as a ``dreadlock''why in quote marks? aa/artist calls them dreadlocks/hasidim wear sidelocks/stet quotes/pk in Hasidic Smoker. The text, by two designers and two writers, is lively and witty, providing informative insights into the art of collage. (Apr.)