Halos without angels: the smart, sad, beautiful collages of Kim Arthun

Halos without angels: the smart, sad, beautiful collages of Kim Arthun

Nov 2, 2025

Kim Arthun graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1976, the year before the famous “Pictures” exhibition at New York City’s Artists Space, which gave the incipient movement of media-critical artists, now known as the Pictures Generation, their name. One of the most prominent Pictures artists, Richard Prince, wouldn’t exhibit his rephotographed magazine ads for another four years. But Arthun was already doing work as a UNM undergrad that took a similarly critical approach to the cropping and framing of mass-market images.

Compared to the canonical Pictures artists, Arthun was much more invested in the theories and methods of formalist composition, particularly those of the Russian constructivists. But by using women’s fashion magazines, namely Vogue, and cropping out almost all of the text and recognizable imagery from them, he called attention to their backgrounds, including the types of lighting and framing devices used in editorial spreads. Such contextual frames, which the philosopher Jacques Derrida called “the parergon,” typically go unnoticed, despite having a strong subconscious influence on the reader/consumer. These subtle visual cues lend a halo of luxury and glamour to the magazine’s subjects. Many Pictures artists sought to bring such frames to the fore.

When Prince rephotographed Marlboro ads of cowboys, he aimed a simple point-and-shoot camera at the magazine, and he used a flash. This created bright spots of glare, emphasizing the glossiness of the magazine paper, in contrast to the rugged romanticism of the cowboys. When Louise Lawler took a camera into the home of a wealthy art-collecting couple, photographing “Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut” (1984), she showed how even the work of a die-hard modernist like Jackson Pollock could be rendered “decorative” when juxtaposed with a matching piece of porcelain crockery. For these artists, the context was the text. The frame was the art.

This brings us to Arthun, whose collages from the 1970s to the present day transform fragments from the backgrounds of women’s fashion magazines into often melancholy reflections on desire and yearning. Like Jo Broughton’s “Empty Porn Sets” — a series she began in 2001, depicting model-home-type film sets after the nude performers left — Arthun’s collages retain an aura of faded sexiness despite their complete lack of human figures.

For the works in his current show at Exhibit/208, Arthun exclusively uses issues of Vogue magazine from an archive he’s been collecting for decades. Dedicated followers of fashion might be able to tell which year, or even which season, the backgrounds are from, but for most of us, these bits of floors and walls and skies constitute a murky, timeless nowhere-land. The models may change, the fashions may change, but the false utopian allure of the parergon remains. And that’s what Arthun collects: artistically-lit spaces where beautiful people once posed. The halos without the angels.

One piece to the right of the entrance consists of two simple fragments. On top is a grayscale domestic interior, indicated by floral wallpaper and part of a lampshade. The bottom fragment, a purplish haze, contains so little visual information that it could be anything from a seascape to a concrete wall. Both were cut from the top of their respective magazine pages, as evidenced by their white upper borders. Arthun has cut the bottom fragment into a jagged shape somewhere between a flag and a meat cleaver. He has also torn a portion of it, which curves in upon itself like a Möbius strip. Directly above this dimensional detail, in the top image, is a foggy shaft of light. Arthun has aligned this patch of light with the ripped-out absence below, as if a hazy ghost had leapt out of the top image and torn clear through the bottom one. It’s spooky. Few artists can produce such a disquieting effect with two simple, cut-up fragments. The celebrated British collage artist John Stezaker does it, but his art is fundamentally figurative and surreal. Arthun’s accomplishment is greater, since his source material is so much more blank-looking and narratively opaque.

The best pieces in the show are Arthun’s wood-panel cut-outs. For these, the artist enlarges his collages to perhaps 20 or 30 times their original size, prints them onto giant decals, like the ones advertisers use to wrap vehicles, affixes them to wood panels and cuts them out with an electrical saw. These shaped wall pieces put Arthun in conversation with other artists, from El Lissitzky to Frank Stella, who have made abstract wall art in the past. Since 1994, Arthun has also been an official member of Madí, a politically-oriented abstract art movement, most of whose members live in South America, and all of whom use irregular shapes in their work. Unlike Lissitzky, Stella and most Madí artists, however, Arthun starts with glossy magazine ads and incorporates current advertising technology into his practice, keeping the discourse of media theory front and center at all times.

That discourse didn’t begin with the Pictures Generation, of course. It had its origins in the collage practices of the cubists and the dadaists, and it really got going with the pop artists of the 1960s. Arthun was 9 years old in 1962, the year pop artist James Rosenquist had his first solo. Like Rosenquist, Arthun became a billboard painter as a young adult. Yes, billboards were still being painted by hand in the mid-1970s, when Arthun graduated college.

The years he spent crafting huge, blown-up images at very close range, just inches from the billboards’ surfaces, gave him an eye for the emotionally-charged moments of light and color that sometimes bubble into view in those zoomed-in expanses. Today, he discovers such moments in magazines. The simpler and bigger he makes his work, the stronger the emotional force of those moments become for his viewers.

Arthun cofounded Exhibit/208 in 1999 as an artist-run gallery to showcase his own work and that of his friends. Today, Exhibit/208 is an Albuquerque institution, and Arthun continues to discover and promote up-and-coming young artists alongside those he’s been championing for decades. The downside of running such a vital, community-oriented art space is that Arthun has had little time to devote to promoting his own career. Apart from a few group shows at European galleries focusing on the Madí movement, Arthun has rarely shown outside of New Mexico since the 1980s, and that’s a shame. Few artists have bridged geometric abstraction and media-critical conceptualism so adroitly, or with so much heart. I hope someday he gets his due.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.