SOLOMON ADLER: 

This work is delicately composed from small found fragments of paper and textiles.  Hannelore Baron made thousands of these collages in her small Bronx apartment between the 1960s and the 1980s. 

 Baron’s tendency to scribble incoherent language on her collages, was a testament both to a private language that she developed, and to a sort of universal language that she believed could be understood by everybody.  She reduced her icons to these very simple forms that were immediately legible. A figure, an oval, a bird. 

Working in relative isolation, her main influences were in fact ancient relics.  Baron would often visit the ancient Egyptian collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was taken by these small fragments of the mummies that had been retained after thousands of years.   

Baron’s collages often feel like the husk or the container for an object. They seem to register the afterimage of something that would have been held within that cloth or that piece of paper.  She would often hold onto individual fragments for months or years at a time working them into pieces ,then pulling them off those collages and adhering them to new works. Every fragment was treasured by the artist. But at the same time, she noted that as it aged even within her care, it became more beautiful.