John Ashbery, Bingo Beethoven, 2014, collage on vintage bingo board, 8 1/4″ x 7 1/2″. Photo courtesy Tibor de Nagy

Our Spring 2009 issue featured eleven collages by John Ashbery, who’s been working in the medium since he was an undergrad at Harvard—roughly the same time he began to write poetry. “One thing he obviously values in collage is its implied anyone-can-do-it modesty, its lack of high-artiness, its resistance to monumentality,” the New York Timessays of his art:

His own collages have this character. They’re light and slight. They feel more like keepsakes than like art objects, souvenirs of a life and career that gain interest primarily—some might say entirely—within the context of that life and career.

Starting today, Tibor de Nagy has an exhibition featuring new collages by Ashbery and by the filmmaker Guy Maddin; the pair collaborated on an adaptation of the lost Dwain Esper exploitation movie How to Take a Bath, for which Maddin filmed Ashbery’s script.

“I suppose this gluey and scissory medium is where the sensibilities of [our] chosen fields come closest,” Maddin has said, “where we unroll for the public the secret blueprints for the little visual collisions.”

You can see their collages at Tibor de Nagy through July 31.

Guy Maddin, Untitled, 2015, dried leaves and collage on paper, 8 1/2″ x 8 3/4″.

Guy Madden, Untitled (#07), 2015, collage and whiteout on book cover, 9 4/5″ x 7 3/4″.

Guy Maddin, Untitled (#19), 2015, collage on paper, 12 1/4″ x 9″.

John Ashbery, Desert Flowers, 2014, collage, 9 3/4″ x 14″.

John Ashbery, The Painter, 2014, collage, 15″ x 20 1/2″.