Julie Rafalski

In her modernist collage work, predominantly artist Julie Rafalski works with the output of artists of the modernist era. With this in mind, her bright and playful collages act as humorous visual dialogues. At the core, in many ways her deadpan humour manifests itself in the misquoting the visual language of artists. All in all, Rafalski enters into a continuous visual conversation with well-known and recognisable artworks.

For ‘Unfolding I’, Julie Rafalski uses a fragmented photo for her modernist collage, in this architectural example designed by Mies van der Rohe. Van der Rohe’s piece was subsequently cut out from a book and combined with brightly coloured shapes that demarcate an alternative space. Van der Rohe, important to note was one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.

Julie Rafalski is an artist working primarily with collage, drawing and photography. On the whole, she explores the inter-relationship between place, memory and time. In her ‘Unfolding’ series, Rafalski displays architectural and imaginative shapes and forms in modernist collage work. As well as this, she creates dialogue between these shapes with van der Rohe’s architectural language. She suggests an imaginary space that is light hearted and unpredictable, without a doubt in sharp contrast to the greyness, minimalism and uniformity of his buildings.