“Miriam Tölke’s multi-layered collages have the dream quality of the young Surrealism; they are playing fields of a calculated montage technique that immediately relativizes any viewer confidence in the image and the quotation of reality by the next layer. Good pictures are characterized by the fact that the longer one looks at them, the more layers of meaning they reveal. In modernism, this includes not least the theme of ‘art about art”.
On closer inspection, one would find cinematographic traces, cross-fading, for example, even in a double, ironic cross-fade that quotes a René Magritte invention. One would find the dialogue between the flawlessness of fashion photography, which idealizes the female face or the female body in a classicist way, with the objet trouvé -enthusiasm for ‘rough,’ abstract structures.
But even more beautiful than the analytical understanding of what Miriam Tölke actually ‘does’ is to entrust oneself to the magic of the works of art. Their meaning emerges in the viewer’s mind as an amalgam of images burned in long ago with the new ones Miriam Tölke brings us. And because we are also what we have seen, so it goes: So many viewers, so many different images, even if we all look at the same collage.” Christoph Stölzl