Lech Szporer

Selected Collage

Toyscapes (New York, USA, 2020-2021)

A series of large-scale collage paintings involving toys and other such items found on the floors of children’s play areas with admixtures of enamel paint, and various glues and resins. Stories are told through the vibrant and saturated sedimentations of symbolic items, maelstroms of color, tornadoes of characterizations, tsunamis of the cartoonification of reality. Both happy and sad, these collage paintings are vanitas. Like the colors of leaves and flowers before they die, these brilliant and glossy collage paintings throw death and dying, mortality and the aging body back at the viewer. From the loss of youth and innocence, youthful optimism and naivety, to the loss of color, vibrancy, stamina, fertility, strength, sharpness, attractiveness, fitness, agility, to the loss of time and time perceived, and to the loss of loved ones and the loss of love - living is dying as aging is about acceptance.

Apparatuses of Capture (New York, USA, 2015-2020)

In both A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Foucault, we can see how the early tendency of state power to overcome primitive societies as well as in the early stages of incarceration as a method of punishment involved the implementation of rent, fees, tickets, financial penalties on those coerced into constituency.

The Apparatuses of Capture large-scale collage series involves parking tickets the artist received during his stay in Coney Island, as well as black enamel paint, glue, and architectural schematics that were discarded by architects and collected by the artist. What are the underpinnings of this apparatus of capture we are born into? And how might it visually be constructed? These are attempted visualizations of a more invisible state of social control.

Against Architecture (DC, USA, 2018)

Depicting the ever-present tension between nature and architecture and the instability of institutions, the Against Architecture large-scale collage series involves the admixtures of various glues and wax with discarded yard tools, mummified organic material, piano parts, broken blue glass, wood, ballet slippers, and architectural schematics that were discarded by architects and collected by the artist. Jane Elliott’s Lady Bugs is covered with dead lady bugs collected from Jane Elliott’s late husband’s toolshed.

Monochromes (New York & DC, USA, 2014-2016)

Darker issues of addiction, death and grief are raised with the Monochromes large-scale collage series. From yellow American Spirit cigarette packs and Cafe Bustelo ground coffee bags to blackened-out national flags and books, signs of self-sabotage within apocalyptical wastelands are presented on wall-sized wooden panels.