John Stezaker: portrait

Since the 1970s, the celebrated artist John Stezaker (b. 1949) has created distinctive collages using found photographs and illustrated ephemera, particularly mid twentieth-century film stills, press and publicity portraits. His minimal, but impactful interventions in these works – cutting out, slicing and splicing images – create uncanny and psychologically charged results, which challenge our ways of seeing and interpreting images.

This display includes new and other previously unseen collages by Stezaker, and features a specially produced film, Marriage (2018). Featuring hundreds of publicity portraits of actors and actresses screened at twenty-four frames per second, the film references the film industry’s standard projection rate for creating the optical illusion of movement, while the lack of visual continuity between the disparate faces creates the perception of fragmentation and disjuncture that characterise Stezaker’s collages.

Supported by the William Brake Charitable Trust