WEIRD SHOW

TWS is an art platform dedicated to the showcase and exploration of contemporary collage through exhibitions, publishing and workshops & sessions.

The whole thing is co-curated by Rubén B and Max-o-matic

06/01/2026

We've got to admit it, we've been obsessed with this artist for quite some time. Raphaël Vicenzi (aka My Dead Pony) works in Brussels with a clear set of contradictions: high fashion photography as source material, punk and graffiti as the aesthetic filter, a daily practice built on cutting images before inspiration arrives rather than waiting for it.

The fashion imagery is deliberate. It comes loaded with aspiration and cultural meaning. His process dismantles it — distressing, layering, fragmenting — until what's left looks like it came from the opposite end of the cultural spectrum. "Bubbles of beauty in a sea of urban decay," he calls it.

His definition of collage: "Cut. Glue. Repeat. Keep it raw. Keep it dirty."
Read the full interview — link in bio.

05/31/2026

"Effect without cause, moments of apparent stasis. I like the idea of taking the comic book format and working against its intended usefulness."

Cobalt is a Chicago-based artist who came to collage through the visual language of punk and indie music — photocopied flyers, zines, album covers made on Xerox machines. His source material is vintage children's books and comics. He strips out the narrative logic those formats depend on: no story, no dialogue, no cause and effect. Just an image in a moment with no interest in explaining where it came from.

Source: theweirdshow.info/2025/10/30/childhood-mysteries-an-intro-to-forestter-cobalt/

05/28/2026

Every collection is a self-portrait. The objects just aren't always the obvious part.
Over the past months we've been asking artists and curators in the TWS community what they collect and why.

Max-o-matic collects relationships — every object tied to someone who shaped his work. Eduardo Recife builds a mental archive alongside the physical one, carrying images in his head years before understanding why he kept them. Adam Brierley developed an eye through fifteen years of hunting vintage clothing and applies the same instinct to finding collage material. Cless searched through more than 35 links a day during his mother's illness — not always to buy, because the searching itself was the point. Sònia López collects cameras, movie posters and British stamps: three different philosophies of seeing that she sums up in one line — "I collect ways of seeing."

Five people. Five completely different answers to the same question. None of them about owning things.

We want to hear from you now. What do you collect, and what does it tell you about yourself? Leave it in the comments.

All five full texts at the link in bio.

05/25/2026

Mary Didoardo works on wood panels with masking tape, a blade, and a line she draws before she knows where it's going. The first cut is improvisational. Everything after it is the painting trying to become coherent.
When that process works, it happens in four or five layers. When it doesn't, she switches modes entirely — cutting paper shapes, pinning them to the surface, using collage to solve what instinct left unresolved.
The paintings look effortless. The surfaces tell a different story: scraped, layered, physically worked. She trained as a sculptor and it shows. Paint as mass, not just color.

"Just trying these things out — it's pleasure and desperation."

Studio visit by@andreaburgay
Read the full interview — link in bio.

Story Line opened May 21 at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York.
On view through June 26.

05/24/2026

"Collage is contrast — the meeting between absence and presence."

Al-Ghadban is a Kuwaiti-born artist and designer based in New York who trained at the School of Visual Arts. She came to collage from a digital practice — coding her own websites as a child — and moved toward working with her hands as a way of thinking the screen couldn't replicate. The "absence" in her work is literal: what was cut out, the negative space left by the blade. What's not there shapes the image as much as what remains.

Source: theweirdshow.info/2020/04/20/najeebah-al-ghadban-collage-as-the-subtle-meeting-of-absence-and-presence

05/21/2026

The female body has always been a political statement. Three artists spent a century making sure it got to say something different.

Hannah Höch was the only woman officially recognised in Berlin Dada — and nearly kept out of its first major exhibition by her male colleagues. She responded with photomontages built from the same newspapers that told German women who they were supposed to be. In 1976, Linder discovered Höch's work at Manchester Polytechnic and turned the same logic on her own epoch: the women's magazines, po*******hy and domestic catalogues of 1970s consumer Britain. Wangechi Mutu's early collages — made on transparent Mylar — pushed the method further, assembling hybrid female figures from fashion magazines, medical diagrams and ethnographic photographs to interrogate the colonial gaze imposed on Black women's bodies.

Three artists, three political moments, one consistent recognition: the images that circulate about women's bodies are never neutral, and the scissors are a legitimate answer. Each generation inherited the method and found new material that needed cutting.

Collage is particularly suited to this work because the act itself makes the argument. Höch wrote: "I wish to blur the firm boundaries which we tend to delineate around all we can achieve." That sentence still holds.

05/18/2026

The hardest part of making something isn't finding material. It's knowing what to throw away.

Julián Galay rarely faces a blank page. He faces the opposite: years of accumulated notebooks, recordings, found objects and stolen quotes demanding to become something. Everything goes in. Then comes the part most creative people don't talk about.

"Making a piece usually involves subtracting — climbing that mountain of material to see if there's something worth keeping." He describes composing as "an act of distillation. Of filtering. Of removing, removing, removing."

He's an Argentine composer, filmmaker, writer and performer based in Berlin, working across concerts, books, radio operas, films and performative lectures. He made the collage connection himself: "My practice is closely related to collage, even if I never called it that. I'll pick up a card from the trash, record a bird's call, jot down a friend's dream, lift a quote from Vila-Matas — I gather, and then I compose — shaping it into something."
The removal is what keeps it honest.

Full interview with Julián Galay — link in bio.

05/17/2026

"I like the idea of excavating materials from the past and deconstructing precious things, as opposed to preserving and collecting."
Andrea Burgay ( )

Burgay is an artist and curator who made a magazine (Cut Me Up) explicitly designed to be cut apart. Her position on preservation runs against most collector instinct: she would rather open the book and use it than keep it closed and intact. The word "excavating" does specific work here -- excavation leaves a mark on the site. It is a different relationship to source material than sampling or referencing.

Read the complete interview on our website:
https://theweirdshow.info/2021/03/23/cut-me-up-and-fold-me-a-dialogue-between-artists-michael-oatman-and-andrea-burgay-about-her-magazine-and-how-people-dont-like-it-when-you-cut-up-books-for-any-reason/

05/15/2026

Every object is one decision away from meaning something completely different.
That decision is context. Nicole McLaughlin started collecting mismatched shoes and leftover swatches from a footwear company that threw them out daily. Old volleyballs became slippers. Haribo candy packets became board shorts. A camera bag became a bralette. Two croissants — eaten for breakfast afterwards — became a bra. The material already existed. The only thing missing was a different question about what it could be.

Collagists do this with images: take a photograph out of its original context, place it somewhere new, and it means something it never meant before. McLaughlin does the same thing with objects. The logic is identical — appropriation, recontextualization, new meaning — just three-dimensional and wearable.
Her work has been nominated for the Beazley Design of the Year at the Design Museum in London, shown at the Berman Museum, Cornell University and the Anchorage Museum, and featured in the New York Times and Vogue. She's collaborated with Hermès, Nike, Arc'teryx and Gucci. The practice that started with discarded shoe samples has ended up in institutions.

The objects were always there. She just keeps asking what else they could be.
Nicole McLaughlin — — designer, Boulder CO / Brooklyn NY.

Artist Selection: Cless /

05/13/2026

These six artists were part of TWS before it had a gallery, before it had a name for what it was doing, before any of this existed as a project with a shape.

James Gallagher. Fred Free. Cless. Charles Wilkin. Rubén B. Max-o-matic.
TWS Editions 01-06 gathers their work into a first collection — limited prints that carry 15 years of shared history.

These prints were selected from their existing work to launch TWS Editions — a program that puts money directly in the hands of the artists and keeps TWS running as an independent project. No middlemen, no institution taking a cut. When you buy an edition, the people who made the work and the platform that champions it are the ones who benefit.

If you've followed TWS for any amount of time, you already know what these artists mean to the platform. If you're new here, this is a good place to start.

Available at the link in bio.

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