Tonalist Abstraction VI, paper collage

Wallace Polsom is an artist who creates layered, well-integrated paper collages that express a variety of emotions and experiences. The artist tends toward classical imagery in his collages, blending aesthetics from renaissance painting with more modern advertising paintings and other cut-out imagery.

God's First, paper collage

In the series Life in the Bloodstream, Polsom’s collages take on the aesthetics of a magazine publication, blending classical and romantic paintings with imagery taken straight out of a 1960s or 70s magazine advertisement, calling to mind the work of early American pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg or James Rosenquist.

While Polsom tends toward the use of a single figure, he often subverts this trope in his own artwork, using abstracted elements, or combining figures with inanimate objects to create dreamlike chimeras. The artist’s collage works are also reminiscent of Tracy Jager.

If 100: The Continuity of IF, paper collage