Since the late seventies, Lewis Klahr has garnered praise for his collage films, whose use of midcentury imagery inspires what the historian Tom Gunning has called “an interplay of grasping and losing, remembering and forgetting.” A new exhibition at Zurich’s Grieder Contemporary, in association with London’s Anthony Reynolds Gallery, finds Klahr pursuing collage outside of film for the first time; in addition to a new movie, he’s debuting a set of standalone works.

“When I first started doing this, in my late twenties, I was really trying to bring my childhood back,” he told Blouin ArtInfo in 2013. “I wanted the world to look like that again. As I aged, and as I grew as an artist, that became not the concern anymore in the same way. Then it was more about memory. Now it’s just a language; it’s a place I like hanging out. It’s this idea of looking at the world with the openness and wonder of a child, so you’re seeing things fresh.”

Lewis Klahr, At Night, 2015, collage on cardboard, 20 1/2″ x 8 7/8″.

Blue + Gray, 2015, collage on cardboard, 10 1/4″ x 10 7/8″.

Streets, 2016, collage on cardboard, 23 7/8″ x 14 1/8″.

High Rise from Grieder Contemporary on Vimeo.

Untitled, 2016, collage on cardboard, 7 7/8″ x 12″.

Still from Circumstantial Pleasures.

Still from Circumstantial Pleasures.

All images copyright the artist, courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London and Grieder Contemporary, Zurich.