John Stezaker

British artist John Stezaker (born 1949) cuts out actors in publicity photos and pastes the remainder onto a dark ground to create hollowed-out silhouettes. The works in this collection superimpose one negative silhouette on top of another in a way that transforms both.

Amidst the post-conceptual crisis of the 1970s, British artist John Stezaker (born 1949) chose to neither pursue the agitprop-inspired trends of his British contemporaries nor fully align himself with the Pictures Generation across the pond. Instead he emerged as a singular figure in contemporary photomontage, motivated by a vested interest in reviving the mechanically produced image and exploring its potentials as a medium even as it began to shift out of circulation in favor of alternative modes of image distribution. Stezaker’s pieces employ a limited number of images in combination, often black-and-white studio portraits and landscape photography, creating an effect that is strikingly minimalistic and elegant for the collage medium. This is the first monograph to provide a historical account of Stezaker’s life and career, offering insight into his art in the context of prevailing image appropriation techniques from the 1970s and ’80s.

This beautiful catalog showcases works by British artist John Stezaker (born 1949) made between 1976 and 2017—interventions into found images dating mostly from the mid-20th century such as film stills, press and publicity photographs, magazines and postcards.

A sense of romance pervades Stezaker’s imagery, whether in the idealization of scenery on a picture postcard, or created by the highly skilled lighting, posing and preparation of a star for a publicity shot, or the minute and all-encompassing technical precision required to shoot a scene of a feature film.

As demonstrated most dramatically by his Love series (2016), Stezaker’s work seduces and ensnares the viewer’s gaze, arresting their perceptual expectations, accessing and questioning their empathetic sense and triggering lateral associations into memory, desire and unease. This catalog features essays by Michael Bracewell and Craig Burnett.

British Conceptual artist John Stezaker (b. 1949) is known for his distinctive, often deceptively simple, collages. He has been making art since the 1970s, but achieved prominence relatively recently.

In 2011, he had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and, in 2012, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, even though he does not take photographs.

Stezaker says collage is about ‘stuff that has lost its immediate relationship with the world’ and involves ‘a yearning for a lost world’. A collector, he works from an archive of out-of-date images—mostly old film stills, vintage actor head shots, and antique postcards. These images come in standard sizes and are highly conventionalised—all variations on themes.

Art critic David Campany says, Stezaker ‘is drawn to that very slim space between convention and idiosyncrasy.’

In addition to collages, Lost World includes poignant found-object-sculptures: a selection of antique mannequin hands, offering a repertoire of gestures. There’s also a film, Crowd, presenting hundreds of film stills of crowd scenes, each for one frame only, in a bewildering blur.

Reframing image fragments from postcards, John Stezaker’s series Crossing Over (2005–13) focuses on the incidental micro-narratives of life that are often overlooked in these everyday objects.

Celebrated artist John Stezaker is widely known for his innovative approach to found photographic imagery. Building upon the corresponding The 3rd Person Archive series, the image fragments in this volume span the history of postcard production. Moving from the Victorian era to the postwar period and black and white to colour imagery, Stezaker focuses on the female figure as well as notions of return and crossing back.

Exploring time and memory, Crossing Over frames seemingly minor details, such as the figures passing on a street corner or conversing on a park bench, as well as the marks left by the physical movement of the images themselves.

Reframing image fragments from postcards, John Stezaker’s series Crossing Over (2005–13) focuses on the incidental micro-narratives of life that are often overlooked in these everyday objects.

Celebrated artist John Stezaker is widely known for his innovative approach to found photographic imagery. Building upon the corresponding The 3rd Person Archive series, the image fragments in this volume span the history of postcard production. Moving from the Victorian era to the postwar period and black and white to colour imagery, Stezaker focuses on the female figure as well as notions of return and crossing back.

Exploring time and memory, Crossing Over frames seemingly minor details, such as the figures passing on a street corner or conversing on a park bench, as well as the marks left by the physical movement of the images themselves.

Reprinted to actual size, 65 image fragments in this artist project are collected for the first time here.

Focusing on John Stezaker’s subversion of landscape painting and the nude figure, this volume reapproaches the artist’s important innovations in collage through the prism of art historical tradition.

John Stezaker’s found images, collages and image fragments are most associated with cinematic imagery, however it is the other found-image sources which he has worked with over the past 30 years which is the focus of this publication; notably the artist’s 'Bridge' collages and the anatomical nudes of his 'Fall' and 'Expulsion' series.

This catalogue – published in association with Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia, which showed the exhibition John Stezaker: Nude and Landscape in October 2011 – centres on Stezaker’s works from the 1980s, when he switched from the cinematic imagery of the 1970s towards ‘an engagement with the culture of the image to the nature of the image’.

The catalogue presents many new works that have not been shown before and, interestingly, also unaltered found images so similar to the Stezaker collages that they are only identifiable when focusing on the absence or presence of the artist’s cut.

Over 40 full-colour images are accompanied by texts by curator Sid Sachs, who explores the relationship between the landscape and the nude, and Elizabeth Manchester who looks at the notion and role of ‘The Source’ in Stezaker’s work.

Spanning more than three decades, this richly illustrated monograph demonstrates John Stezaker’s engagement with the ceaseless flow of images resulting from 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' series.
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.

An overview of John Stezaker’s film still collages, this book showcases the evolution of the artist’s relationship with a specific material.

John Stezaker began his ongoing series of film still collages in 1979; the result of a period that marked a crucial change in the direction of the artist’s work, which had previously been centred around a text-based ‘conceptualism’.

The series moves with Stezaker’s changing interests; using stills from classic American-period Hitchcock films as raw material before shifting towards the undistinguishable mass of 1940s and early 1950s low-budget studio films.

Featuring collages based on a combination of film still excisions and superimpositions, this ongoing series is catalogued comprehensively for the first time in this volume.

Bringing together Stezaker’s earliest film still collages to his most recent, full-colour illustrations are accompanied by an essay by David Campany and a conversation between the critic and the artist.

Made across a 32-year span, the works in Tabula Rasa unite the central themes in the art of celebrated British artist John Stezaker, from the capacities of collage to the current flow in an age of mass media.

This volume brings silkscreens on canvas from the early 1990s and film still collages from the 1990s and 2009 together for the first time.

Accompanying full-colour illustrations and a series of installation views of Stezaker's work at The Approach, London, an essay by art critic and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell looks at the connections within Stezaker's practice, centering on notions of screens, voids and cut-outs.

Although best known for his small-scale intimate collages of film stills, postcards and other found imagery, John Stezaker's silkscreens reveal another side of the artist.

A comprehensive group of these mid- to large-scale silkscreens (1977–94) are brought together here for the first time. They include manipulated imagery of kissing couples, disembodied men and woman, floating baby-heads as well as film stills.

While, at first, this body of work seems to stand in contrast to the collages, the silkscreens employ many of the same techniques – cutting out, cropping, slicing and over-laying – that are seen throughout Stezaker's practice. Over 80 images are accompanied by an essay Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, the first text to discuss the artist's silkscreens as a whole body of work.

Concentrating specifically on the portrait, John Stezaker's 'Masks' series reflects the artist's ongoing interest with the hidden face. Stezaker’s long-term fascination with the image is translated into alterations, deletions, visual concordances and juxtapositions of disparate sources, intuitively creating new images and relationships.

Notions of the interior and exterior and blindness are key to Stezaker's 'Masks' series. Found postcard images obscure and replace the subject’s physiognomy – leaving a ‘surround’ of hair, neck and clothes – and cavernous landscapes take the place of facial features to form new characters and meanings.

Accompanying over 60 full-colour illustrations, a text from Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith discusses the imagined narrative possibilities of the artist's superimposed images and collages.

In his latest series of collages, John Stezaker explores the edge between caricature and portrait, the real and the incredible.

Using a mixture of screen personae drawn from Hollywood's 'golden era', Stezaker’s collaged portraits take on an imaginary life of their own. These hybrid characters form an ‘unholy marriage’ of found material, to play with scale, figure and the viewers’ expectations of photographic representation.

Accompanying full-colour reproductions, a new essay by Cecilia Järdemar discusses the series' ties to Surrealism, the portraits' power of attraction and the artist's interest in obsolescence.