John Stezaker
John Stezaker -
Fascinated by images, John Stezaker takes ‘classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations’ to create new images. He studied at the Slade school of fine art and has taught at many schools and colleges. He inverts, cuts out, multiples and splices his found images to create new pieces of art. Most of the images he uses are from before was born and he says ‘he rarely uses contemporary photographers and most of the film material is from between the 1940s and the 1950s. Hi distinctive style fo reappropriating found imagery separates him from the rest and gives the images he finds a whole new meaning.
One project in particular called The Marriage series, he pieces together images of ‘forgotten’ movie stars to create a distorted new identity. Saachigallery say these ‘hybrid icons disassociate the familiar to create sensations of the uncanny’. On their own, the original images are known and clear who is in the image but when distorted and collages together the people have become unrecognised and are now new people. Elephant art say he has a ‘playful approach to the dynamics of drama’ in his work and the way he connects and conjoins those images together.
He is known for his surrealist inspired images. For both projects, Dark Star II, 1979, Dark Star V, 2008, Stezaker cuts out silhouette of he movie stars and lays it over black paper. ArtForum say it turns the stars in to a ‘black void, an uneasy, semi abstract sit of projection’
In September of 2012, he was awarded the Deutsche Borse Photography prize. Since the 1990s, Stezaker work has been internationally known and held in venues worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Tate Modern, London, los Angles County Museum of Art, The Approach, London, The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University, St Louis and many more.
As deutcheborsephotographyfoundation .org say his methods are considered ‘wonderfully old fashioned’ and they bring up that we are now in the age o technology and there is no real digital mark of his work apart from where he somethings sources his images. All the editing and cutting out and slicing is done by hand which makes the work more interesting to think about.
References -
https://www.deutscheboersephotographyfoundation.org/en/collect/artists/john-stezaker.php
https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/john-stezaker/
https://theapproach.co.uk/artists/john-stezaker/images/
https://www.petzel.com/artists/john-stezaker/biography
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