In our age of image and information overload, the semiotics of pre-existing images have hardly been explored. Casper Kelly visits five exhibitions that investigate the art of appropriated images in the era of the remix.
It’s plunder-optics summer. It’s chopped and screwed summer. It’s copyright infringement summer. It’s London Gallery Weekend summer, where the word appropriation isn’t a dirty word but one that carries dignity, because appropriation is the name of art. It’s the name of the collage, the montage, the assemblage, the plunderphonic, the reclaimed wood, the recycled aluminium, the found imagery, sound and poetry. If you want, you can also call it image theft or piracy, picture-jacking, parroting, plagiarism, samplepocketing, pinching and purloining. One thing’s for sure: this summer we are straight up copy and pasting (non-derogatory). The methodology of the collage itself is the metaphor, the practice is the paint. I’ve often said that a lot of fine art is nothing without its plaque. Have you ever seen abstract works, such as H.E. Morris’ Songs Of War (2026), and guiltily thought to yourself, “Well, that could’ve been about anything”? In collage art, the image is the plaque.
I visited five exhibitions that deal in the art of appropriation, from katamaris of assembled materials to bubblegum post-pop films of Pamela Anderson and machine-paintings of The Wizard Of Oz. And I loved them all.
The aesthetics of the past have never been more utilised as a critical tool for an accelerated future than the present. Currently at The Mayor Gallery, Happy Birthday America! (on view until 17 July) is marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, bringing together a wide-ranging selection of artists in a reflection on the vitality and diversity of post-war America. Billy Apple’s The Presidential Suite: Johnson & Humphrey at L.B.J. Barbecue (1964) uses xenographic prints of the former president Lydon B. Johnson, and of Hubert H. Humphrey Jr., his vice president. The show merges American diplomacy with the art of the barbeque in a symbolic act of devouring ribs that feels ripe for artistic interpretation. Edward & Nancy Kienholz’s The Wholly Holy Terror (1986) is the exhibition’s ultimate post-God fixture, an assemblage-attack on Christianity using junk-store symbols – toy gorillas, wall-mounted boxes, deer antlers and Christ himself on the cross – appearing more absurd in the mess of mixed media than sublime, more kitsch than King Kong.
Collage was made to marry disparate elements, the high and the low arts. In Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude n. 27 (1962), the nude of the art world canon is melted down to a blob of pink paint, while a collaged row of milkshakes and ice creams remain frozen forever. The striking experience of seeing images preserved by found photography is that we know all things decay, especially beauty, but through the appropriation of photography, it can make us believe that some things, like a sundae, are eternal. When looking at Wesselmann’s enamel, casein and collage on panel, we look at the ice cream which melted half a century ago that appears as though it’s still there. Isn’t that wonderful?
MGM’s The Wizard of Oz tells us a fairytale about somewhere over the rainbow. Luis Bernardo Alonso wrote: “For many, that rainbow is the American Dream.” At Kearsey & Gold in Soho, Lucien Smith’s Burn Down The House (on view until 17 July) takes inspiration in the dream that never came true and Christopher Wool’s “sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids” approach to art. I heard that the paintings in this series were painted with a machine, depicting the perilous moments of the classic film’s black-and-white beginning when Dorothy’s house is lifted into the air via tornado. The machine-executed works are so finely painted, with no indication of a canvas underneath, that they look like pure images, even screenshots. They may as well be appropriated screen-captures of the film’s Matroska file. Mirroring Peter Garfield’s Mobile Homes (1995), domestic life is literally elevated, flying through the sky, being transported into another world. The flying house is the perfect crossing of homesickness for the past and motion sickness from travelling through the present. The borrowed turmoil of the film’s prologue is a monochromatic monograph of Smith’s entire body of work. “I’ve always used images and references as my palette,” he tells me, almost on the verge of tears.
Over at The Approach (23 April – 7 June) is Sara Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo (2024), her second exhibition at the gallery. Held in the main space is a major video installation shot on both digital and 16mm film, shown in an eye-bending panoramic scale. The twenty-minute film charts popular culture and consumerism from the Mercedes-Benz (300SLR) to the Benzodiazepine, the former being the most expensive car ever sold at auction in 2022, and the latter being the baby blue pill that a Google search tells me has a global market value of roughly three billion dollars. Baby Blue Benzo operates with the aesthetic values of a NASCAR driver’s jacket, or a sticker-bombed toilet stall covered in brands, names, images, insignias. It’s a blitz of images watermarked by Shutterstock and Getty, everything printed out and turned into sets assembled out of crumpled-up A4 sheets. Even planet Earth is put on paper. At one point in the film, a narrator asks: “Is it just as good to have a picture of a car?” Cwynar’s film explores surrealism, sleeplessness, and late capitalism as a dream state of information; the panoramic view barrels pictures from one wall to another like a giant doomscroll, a zombified state no doubt indebted to the anxieties of our modern pharmaceutical culture. Cwynar is “Mr Advertiser” while we are “Mrs Consumer.” Baby Blue Benzo is the perfect continuation of Cwynar’s examination of feminism, power, and technology through the lens of colour, Rose Gold – a quasi-educational short film about the baby pink iPhone. The film more or less aptly ends with: “The creator of the Benz did not respond when I asked him to use his image. I used it anyway.”
Slowing down at Deptford’s Studio/Chapple is May God Leave Us Poor (2026) by Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, the artist’s first UK solo show. Drawing on a year-long residency exploring Houston’s slab – slow, loud, and bangin’ – custom car subculture. The musical genre of hip-hop emerged in the nineties as a form of music that incorporated chopped and screwed music. The exhibition embraces plunderphonics, John Oswald’s idea of the “sonic quotation,” and the logic of DJ Screw’s slowed and throwed style of turntabilism and tempo-manipulation. Laghouati-Rashwan’s film Night on MLK Blvd employs the same editing methodologies, using slowness as a resistance to our fast culture. Framed photographs use transparent cassette tapes to physicalise the logic of the mixtape into gallery art. While artists on Spotify jump on the “sped up” bandwagon, Laghouati-Rashwan is kicking back – yet his work still feels urgent. In a day and age of image-maximalism, it’s artists like these (and DJ Screw) who find new ways to squeeze new potential out of art, be that through fucking with the hue, finding a new way to mount it, or simply turning the tempo down.
In Dutch artist Marijn van Kreji’s Living Together (1978), showing at Pale Horse until 18 July, the Dutch word for appropriation, toeëigening, is directly related to iets je eigen maken – literally “to make one’s own.” Living Together explores van Kreji’s sustained engagement with appropriation, repetition, and the interplay between image and language in his studio, where a 1977 Newsweek cover featuring an illustration under the heading “Living Together” inspired the artist to experiment with collage. The studio, for van Kreji, represented a space where images linger – sometimes decorationally, sometimes sub-consciously – and resurface within his own art through duplication. Each art piece credits the original illustrator, like Andy Warhol, with whom he shares a living space within the frame. Working within existing images which he copied, re-drew, partially obscured and collaged, van Kreji shares authorship through a micro-history of his visual world across two decades, framing appropriation not as a cynical theft, but as an act of radical empathy. Generating new meanings through proximity and the ghostly rituals of tracing lines and colour-matching illustrators he never met, Living Together simply asks what a copy can tell us about the original.
The answer might just be: everything. We so often hear the complaint that nothing is original anymore. In our age of image and information overload, the semiotics of pre-existing images have hardly been explored. It’s the era of the remix, the mash-up, the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V – we are in a world that demands us to do more with our visual history, to understand it through tribute, to fuck with it through IP-heists and plundering through the archives. If you want to share this reality, to make sense of this chaos, then sometimes you don’t have to pick up the brush; you just need to take the painting off its mount and sneak it out the fire exit.
