Hannah Höch - Lady Dada

Hanna Höch was a German Dada artist born in 1889, best known for her political collages and photomontages.

Höch was a pioneer of the artistic practice of collaging different photographic and graphic elements from different sources to make a disruptive art statement.

Her technique of reassembling visual elements belonging to others by integrating them into her own larger artistic quest, can be considered one of the earliest examples of “appropriation” as an artistic practice.

This combination of formerly unrelated images to create new meanings has been widely adopted by many Dada and Surrealist artists and later by post-modern conceptual and mix media artist (eg. sculptures, installations, video art).

Despite the Berlin Dada group’s fractures in the early 1920s, Höch kept creating political critical artworks.

She was banned from exhibiting during the Nazi regime as she was accused to produce “degenerate art” and to be a “cultural Bolshevik”, nevertheless she remained in Germany during World War II, retreating to a house outside Berlin in her own form of exile continuing to make art.

In 1945, after the end of the conflict, she was allowed to showcase her artworks again.

Almost 30 years later, her significant contribution to the German avant garde artistic scene has been recognised through retrospectives in Paris and Berlin in 1976 - two years before her death.