Ohne Titel (Contramerk.)

In the 1920s Kurt Schwitters created a new type of artwork which he called 'Merz'. The origins of the term come from a cut-out he made of a bank advertisement which featured the German word 'kommerz' (commerce). The overarching concept of Merz works was to expand the boundaries of art genres and art making through the introduction of found materials. Schwitter’s work would become synonymous with Merz and he would spend his life developing the idea into what is now seen as a precursor of installation art.

Many Merz collages were made from things that Schwitters found in the streets, unneeded or left behind - these included tickets, receipts, stamps, newspaper cut-outs, checkroom numbers and other various scraps, which the artist believed could be used just as well as manufactured pigments. His inclusion of found items did not imply a rejection of traditional painting techniques, but, on the contrary, it was an opportunity to supplant and enhance them. By removing discarded items out of their daily context, Schwitters aimed to liberate them from semantic meaning, their function remaining to provide colour value for the composition. However, despite the artist’s idea that his Merz works were abstract, the found items remained vestiges of the modern world shaped by industrial production, consumerism and media.

The geometric structure that Schwitters imposes on these sourced second-hand papers can also be interpreted as an attempt to create order from the chaos of the surrounding post-World War I Germany. In the hyperinflationary years that he was living through, when paper currency had lost its value, Schwitters used Merz to make social commentary on art, luxury goods and commodities. In the current work, the passenger’s ticket with the Dutch word ‘Contramerk’ could stand for the concept of countermarking coins which was often done when currency was reformed.