Jim Jarmusch: some more collages

James Fuentes is thrilled to present Jim Jarmusch’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, debuting a new series of his iconic hand-torn newsprint collages. The gallery will also be presenting a selection of Jarmusch’s collages alongside new lithographs on the occasion of Frieze Los Angeles.

Celebrated for his work in independent cinema, Jim Jarmusch’s output spans a number of creative disciplines including film, visual art, poetry, and music. Jarmusch has long collected newspaper clippings, gathering visual fragments on an ongoing basis to form an archive of source material for his collages. He likens their creation to the process of automatic writing—each action unfolding naturally, without over-analysis or predetermination. Through this mode, the collages reflect Jarmusch’s wider creative philosophy. As well, the temporal ambiguity of the collected images—their origins becoming unknown—adds a layer of timelessness to the resulting works.

“The interesting thing about them is they reveal to me that my process of creating things is very similar, whether I’m writing a script or shooting a film or making a piece of music or writing a poem or making a collage. I gather the elements from which I will make the thing first. The collages reduce it to the most minimal form of that procedure.”—Jim Jarmusch in an interview with The New York Times

For Jarmusch, the collages serve as a private, integral part of his creative process and were never initially intended for public display. Over decades, he quietly amassed more than 500 of the works, created spontaneously and without concern for an audience. The James Fuentes exhibitions—first in New York in 2021, and now in Los Angeles—mark the only occasions where he has publicly exhibited this deeply personal body of work. In parallel to the first exhibition, Anthology Editions published Jarmusch’s first monograph, Some Collages in 2021.

While the earlier works often combined numerous sources to create layered new images—for example, setting a Victorian-era woman against a modern hospital room—the new collages reflect a heavily refined and simplified approach, selectively removing faces and stripping away contextual elements to generate entirely new narratives within a single layer. Notably, with a single exception, all of these works are faceless. In each, Jarmusch carefully tears the newspaper by hand, amplifying the material’s fibrous texture. A single gesture—a rip, a repositioning—entirely transforms the imagery, rendering mass imagery into abstract forms and collapsing identifying features into voids.