Surrealism Meets Pop-Art: Follow Collage Artist Maria Rivans

British artist Maria Rivans is known for her scrapbook-style collages. A mash-up of Surrealism meets Pop-Art, Rivans’s work re-appropriates vintage ephemera to create dreamy realms, which transport the viewer into fantastical worlds of imaginary.

Much like her creations, her approach to collage making is rather unique. Intertwining different film and TV genres – from vintage Hollywood to 1970s sci-fi, B-movies, and TV trash – Rivans’ work is in a constant dialogue with cultures of the past, reinventing existing film plots and narratives while spinning bizarre and dreamlike tales.

Like most collage artists, her process begins with an extensive collection of vintage ephemera, which she scavenges from antique books and retro magazines. Like piecing together an unruly jigsaw puzzle, Rivans begins to collate and assemble the cut-out fragments and scraps, laboring over long periods and making alteration after alteration, until the collage begins to take shape.

Her use of collage might reflect the complex and fragmented world from which her art arises, but an attention to beauty and to the harmony of composition gestures optimistically towards the social capacity to piece it back together again.

Rivans’ work takes the form of both large-scale originals and limited edition prints. Each of her artworks is the product of months of careful deliberations and decisions, every tiny tweak necessary in the final formation. The result – whether big or small – is well worth following.