Collection: George Kuchar

George Kuchar (1942–2011, New York) made films with his twin brother Mike from the age of twelve, shooting melodramas, horror pictures and domestic comedies on 8mm in the Bronx. Championed by Jonas Mekas and saluted by Andy Warhol, the Kuchars became foundational figures of American underground cinema — filmmakers who treated low budget not as a limitation but as a formal position. George later taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for over thirty years, producing a vast body of video diaries alongside his films.

His work is simultaneously camp and sincere, grandiose and shabby, technically crude and compositionally precise. The body — embarrassed, naked, ill, comic — is always at the centre.

The printed matter gathered here documents a practice that institutional cinema largely ignored until it was too late, and that the art world is still catching up with.