hannah hoch
Hannah Höch is an important artist to be aware of not only because of her role as a pioneer of photomontage (what she and other Berlin Dadaists called what we now know as collage), but because of her role in challenging societal roles (in her case, more specifically the gender roles of society during the 1920s and 1930s) in ways her male Dada counterparts only spoke of doing.
Höch’s expansive body of work uses photomontage in a way no one else really had before her time. She explored themes of sexuality, gender roles, and other aspects of the human condition that she observed during her lifetime. Her work’s influence on modern collage is more than just aesthetic—it showed awareness, almost a century ago, that the images mass media throws at us in efforts to affect us can be turned around into art that flips the script and can open up “a new and fantastic field for a creative human being”.
Read more about Hannah Hoch from the Guardian in Hannah Hoch: Art's original punk."