John Stezaker at the Contemporary Art Society

British artist John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker 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.

His ‘Dark Star’ series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his Third Person Archive: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations. Presented as images on their own, they now take the centre stage of our attention

This first major exhibition of John Stezaker offers a chance to see work by an artist whose subject is the power in the act of looking itself. With over 90 works from the 1970s to today, the artist reveals the subversive force of images, reflecting on how visual language can create new meaning.

The work of British artist John Stezaker (b. 1949) engages with the ceaseless flow of images that is the consequence of popular culture, the mass media and mechanical reproduction. Instead of creating new images fromscratch, Stezaker uses existing material: classic moviestills, vintage postcards and book illustrations. By means of minimal intervention, such as cropping, excision, rotation or occlusion, the artist removes these images from their original context, and allows them to acquire new meaning. Stezaker’s emphasis on the image itself reflects his fascination in the visual:‘ I am dedicated to fascination – to image fascination, a fascination for the point at which the image becomes self-enclosed and autonomous. It does so through a series of processes of disjunction.’ The artist’s collages often add or take away visual elements. The unexpected encounter of diverse images create surprising new narratives; the precise cut-out opens up new interpretations. His found images and image fragments take such approach of re-contextualisation even further. Through simple rotation or mere cropping, the previously forgotten images acquire a renewed poetic resonance, and, in many cases, disquieting allure. (Introduction written for the Whitechapel Gallery for his exhibition in March 2011).