Outsiders Newcastle, the North-East gallery of curator-director Steve Lazarides, presents Cluster 10, the debut solo UK exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Mario Wagner.

Wagner’s colourful and arresting style has been used to great effect in premium style titles like Esquire and Vanity Fair.

The paintings’ collage backgrounds harken back to the 50s and 60s when science fact raced to keep up with science fiction. It was an era when technology was embraced unthinkingly, and man was only a short step from realizing a total leisure culture or his destiny amongst the stars, depending on his adventurousness of spirit. The pictures’ protagonists however pursue a very different agenda. Slick moral relativists from a more recent age, they ride out with sinister intent, set traps, stew plots, and bury their dead clandestinely in compelling micro-narratives that trigger the less welcome elements of our imagination.

Closes on May 21, 2011.

The Outsiders
77 Quayside
Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 3DE
United Kingdom

More of Wagner’s work after the jump.

Currently on view at Dorian Grey Gallery is a delightful two artist show of intimate drawings and collages produced on vintage paper. Both Megan Greene and Edwina White subvert and recontextualize familiar subject – Audubon prints and figurative narratives respectively. The two artist’s works contrast well in theme and process which makes for a strong dynamic in Grey’s small East Village space.

Up through May 15, 2011.

Dorian Grey Gallery
437 East 9th Street
New York, New York

A full look at the exhibition follows.

Out this month from Gestalten, “Cutting Edges documents the new heyday of collage in current art and visual culture. Today’s artists, illustrators, and designers are increasingly drawn to this artistic technique by the challenges of seamlessly melding traditional craftsmanship with skilled computer montage. They are not only composing a wide variety of visual elements, but are also deliberately omitting, deleting, and destroying them. This book is an inspiring collection of these unique examples of contemporary collage.”

Select page views follow.

Two things about this work of art are amazing. First, the scale. Second, Yan Yongliang has turned a collection of black and white photographs and formed a collage mimicking cigarette ash. The ash itself mimics a city scape, and the photographs are all architectural. Full circle, fully engrossing. (via DB).

Running from December 9, 2010 to January 9, 2011, Melt Down features large scale installation from Andrew Schoultz. Schoultz’s art is essentially about everyday life in America – he filters in bits and bobs from popular culture, including 1990s clipart, in his collage – pulled from a personal archive of ephemera. His narratives are sometimes political, but often simply fun. The exhibition will be hosted by Incase at Project Space.

Project Space
603 North La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles CA 90036

Jeffrey Meyer, aka Goofbutton, has released several new collages in recent weeks. Working in digital media, Meyer’s compositions balance geometric shapes, sharp colors, and nature. Hands, too, seem a popular device.

Learn more at Goofbutton.

Several examples follow.

Collage artist Michael Anderson has unveiled his latest works at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York City. The Street is My Palette takes advertising posters off the street and employs them in fresh compositions.

The exhibition is on view through December 30, 2010.

Claire Oliver Gallery
513 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

In our humble opinion, this is one not to miss. Betye Saar, whose often challenging work seeks to reveal marginalized or hidden histories, offers just under 30 new works – 4 years of studio work – no small feat for an 84 year old artist.

From the gallery -

Betye Saar: CAGE, A New Series of Assemblages & Collages will be on view from November 6 to December 23, 2010. This ambitious installation of twenty-one mixed-media assemblages and seven collages represents four years of intensive studio work by the eighty-four-year-old Californian. Over the years, Saar has collected various cages from flea markets, yard sales, and antique shops; these ordinary household objects now comprise the foundation for a series centered on forms of containment and confinement. In Saar’s art, the cage is a signifier of physical incarceration and a metaphor for social, psychological, spiritual, economic, and historical exclusion. But, consistent Saar’s affirmative outlook, the cage is also a bold symbol of resilience and survival. The assemblages and collages in Betye Saar: CAGE also share with her other works a global perspective interlaced with the artist’s personal interest in metaphysics, magic, mystery, legends, and superstitions. The questions of repression, disenfranchisement, and resistance that dominate the lives of many people around the world are fused with lessons from US history, African spiritualism, and the rich visual traditions of Afro-diasporic art.

The exhibition runs to December 23, 2010.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
24 West 57th Street
(btw 5th and 6th), 7th Floor*
New York, NY 10019

Above: Betye Saar, Birds of a Feather, 2010. Mixed media collage on paperboard 12 3/4″ x 12″, signed and dated.

A look at Saar’s assemblages after the jump.

Shepard Fairy fans take note, the Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art now has a terrific range of works on consignment. Think very limited run screen prints (i.e. editions of 5) and originals. Fariey’s Alva Frontside of 2009, made with stencil and mixed media on collage paper, and the first from possible edition of 5 (only two made to date), caught my eye.

That work is shown above. Many others after the jump.