Robert Voigts

Robert Voigts
North Aurora, Illinois, USA

STATEMENT

My experiments in collage and assemblage and my personal study of art history have been the biggest influence in my work, as well as the landscapes of Illinois and Missouri. I am also inspired by poetry, literature, film, and theology. When beginning a piece, I don’t have a fixed idea in mind, but I follow intuitive impressions. I use photography, magazines, catalogs, album jackets, book covers, found art, paper, consumer packaging, and trash. I have a collection of ephemera from the late 70s and I also find much of my current material at Goodwill stores. I experiment with color, shape, line and texture. I play with ideas of chance, opposites, mundaneness, memory, wonder, contradiction, juxtaposition, poems, letters, numbers, punctuation, and more. After following the impressions and lots of experimentation, I arrive at a stopping point, contemplate what emerged and considers if it is done. If it is, I name it. Names come to me after the process is complete. The names sometimes are derived from visual cues in the work itself. Other times they appear in my mind and seem to fit the piece. Sometimes I search for word fragments in poetry.

BIO

Robert Voigts is a collage artist and graphic designer from the Chicago, Illinois area. He is mostly self-taught except for 2 years in art school. His love of collage began in the late 70s with an artist friend. They collaborated on many projects including collage, exquisite corpse, poetry, music and urban installations. He began experimenting with digital collage in 2018 on an iPad. That evolved into analog collage in 2020 during the pandemic. He work out of my home studio and his current work involves mostly abstract themes using a collection of old ephemera from the 70s and new materials, including packaging, magazines, books, catalogs, and album jackets. My work deals with themes of chance, the absurd and wonders of the mundane.

ARTIST CONTACT

EMAIL | INSTAGRAM

IMAGES