Saturday, March 05, 2011

John Stezaker.


John Stezaker. Photographs by John Stezaker. Ridinghouse and Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2011. 224 pp., 100 colour illustrations, 27 x 22,5cm.

The exhibition John Stezaker is shown at the Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK) until the 18th of March 2011.

It features work by the British artist John Stezaker. In his work he takes "classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations [and] makes collages to give old images a new meaning.

By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images.

Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty."

To view exhibition images go here.


Book description:

"The art of John Stezaker engages with the ceaseless flow of images that has been a consequence of mechanical reproduction, mass media and popular culture.

His intervention into these images through collage, excision, reconfiguration, inversion or occlusion can be seen to interrupt their everyday circulation in a profound way: image and perception alike are questioned, rearranged and opened to new possibilities.

Through their transformation Stezaker's images acquire poetic resonance, and, in many cases, a disquieting allure. With over 120 illustrations, this monograph presents the first overview of John Stezaker's work on paper from the 1970s onwards, featuring his found images, collages, image fragments and a selection from The 3rd Person Archive.

Essays by Dawn Ades and Michael Bracewell, as well as a conversation between the artist and curators Daniel F. Herrmann and Christophe Gallois, place Stezaker's work in a historical context and analyse his methodology and practice."


First quote from here.

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