Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters was a German artist from Hanover who made collages and assemblages from tickets, wrappers and scrap, a body of work he called Merz. He turned his house into a growing sculptural environment, the Merzbau, and wrote sound poetry such as the Ursonate. Condemned by the Nazis, he fled to Norway and then Britain, where he was interned on the Isle of Man and spent his last years in Ambleside in the Lake District. Tate holds many of his collages, and the wall of his unfinished Merz Barn is at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle.