Bricolage | Tate

Bricolage

Bricolage refers to the construction or creation of an artwork from any materials that come to hand

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Bricolage is a French wording meaning roughly ‘do-it-yourself’, and it is applied in an art context to artists who use a diverse range of non-traditional art materials.

This approach became popular in the early twentieth century when resources were scarce, and aspects of surrealism, dada and cubism have a bricolage character. But it was not until the early 1960s, with the formation of the Italian movement arte povera, that bricolage took on a political aspect and it was used by artists to bypass the commercialism of the art world. Arte povera artists constructed sculptures out of rubbish in an attempt to devalue the art object and assert the value of the ordinary and everyday.

Since then, artists have continued to make art out of detritus – for example, Tomoko Takahashi constructs vast sculptures of junk found on the streets as a comment on the disposable nature of our culture and society.

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Related terms and concepts

• Arte povera

  Arte povera was a radical Italian art movement from the late 1960s to 1970s whose artists explored a range of unconventional processes and non traditional ‘everyday’ materials

• Assemblage

  Assemblage is art that is made by assembling disparate elements – often everyday objects – scavenged by the artist or bought specially

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  Collage

  Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface

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  Mixed media

  Mixed media is a term used to describe artworks composed from a combination of different media or materials

Selected artworks in the collection

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  Untitled

  Jannis Kounellis 1960–98
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  Che Fare?

  Mario Merz 1968–73
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  Venus of the Rags

  Michelangelo Pistoletto 1967, 1974

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