Gelosia 1927

László Moholy-Nagy made this intriguing collage, 'Gelosia', using cut and pasted photographs, probably around the early 1920s. It’s a bit like looking into someone’s dream, isn’t it? You can almost feel Moholy-Nagy piecing together these fragments, one on top of the other, finding strange connections between them. I imagine him snipping away at magazines, newspapers, arranging and rearranging until this unsettling tableau emerged. There’s this ghostly figure standing next to a woman in a bathing suit, all connected by these fine lines—like invisible threads of thought or feeling. Then there's another, stranger image: a figure within a figure. What could it all mean? Is it a comment on relationships, or a psychological study? Or a formal composition? Moholy-Nagy, like his peers, was deeply engaged with new ways of seeing and representing the world, inspired by photography, film, and typography. His artistic peers such as El Lissitzky and Hannah Hoch also worked with similar concepts. I think he's inviting us to construct our own narrative, just as he constructed this image.