“Traditional resources have been exhausted. The only possible reaction is to abolish the painting." These words from 1960 originate from the first ‘Manifeste du Nouveau Réalisme’, written by the art critic Pierre Restany. The French artist Raymond Hains – along with Yves Klein and Daniel Spoerri – was one of the eleven signatories. The new 'realists' viewed the world as a painting. Since 1957, Hains had taken posters glued on top of one another, from the street scene, removed their communicative function in his studio and presented the remaining compositions in an artistic context. He did not create collages, but 'décollages'. Hains flirted with Pop Art for a while in the late Sixties with his enlarged versions of, for example, matchboxes. In 1997, his oeuvre was honoured with the Kurt Schwitters Prize.
