A unique body of vintage photo-collage work from the Hungarian born artist Madame Elemerne de Marsovzsky, dating from the late 20’s to the early 30’s. Only recently discovered, these rare pieces are surreal and often humorous expressions of the quickening pace of industry and urban growth, as well as the onset of the Second World War. Aside from the legacy of this work, a body of dance photographs and a large photo-montage mural from 1936 in the old Budapest airport, little is known about this woman. She disappeared in in 1944, probably a victim of the Holocaust. The relative anonymity of the artists background, however, does not detract from the art itself. Marsovszky’s quizzical perspective of technological progress and its iconography leaves the viewer with long lasting juxtapositions that, whilst historic in content, are quite contemporary in significance.

“It is safe to say that photomontage, like photography and silent film, still has much to contribute in unforeseeable ways to the education of our eye, to our knowledge of optical. psychological and social structures. And it will do so thanks to the clarity and accuracy of its means, in which content and form, meaning and statement, overlap and are inseparable”.

Raoul Hausmann, Berlin 1931