Artistic Mixed-media Collages

Petra Zehner is a German illustrator and collage artist. After studying literature and linguistics in Berlin, Petra experimented with writing, photography, and illustration, which led her to study graphic design in London. Since then, she has moved back and forth between Germany, the UK, Malaysia, and Singapore, before basing herself in Paris. During this time, Petra rediscovered collage as a medium that combines all of her interests. For Petra, collage is also a metaphor for life as a whole, and the way we collect, mix, match, and make things our own.

Petra discovered that she didn’t want to work exclusively with traditional collage methods and created her own combination of analog and digital elements. She is the creative director and founder of Paris Collage Collective, a community that sets regular creative challenges to connect local and global artists, and encourage creative expression that goes “further than likes and shares on social media platforms”. Petra has also worked on various art projects, including Elleree, her own series of 365 images based on the same photo of an unknown woman taken in the early 1900s. She says that having to try new things repetitively in such a way pushes her to look at things with different eyes