Art

Photographer John Stezaker

Lauren Down | Tuesday 1 February, 2011 21:31

Having collected vintage postcards, classic illustrations and movie stills with great zeal throughout his career, English photographer John Stezaker’s work is comprised of a wealth of re-attributed imagery.

Stezaker attended the Slade School of Art in the 60s and as his conceptual art driven rebellion against the norm of pop art came to fruition through his delicately constructed oeuvre. Having said that the readymade imagery that punctuates his work shows clear experimentation with Pop-Arts Dadaist forebearers.

Creating and destroying work at the same time Stezaker’s surreal infused, Max Ernst-esque works are truly beguiling. This exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery showcases a selection of over 90 works that have been adjusted, inverted, sliced and re-assembled in order to subvert the authority of found imagery. Fusing portraits of glamorous and beautiful movie stars with obscure landscape scenes of waterfalls, caves of fields Stezaker ‘Mask’ series transposes contexts and meanings, often making the voyeur turn their head for a double take.

His so called ‘Dark Star’ works result turn publicity portraits from familiar and comfortable staples to eerie cut-out silhouettes, that generate an ambiguous, unsettling absence in place of the homely. Re-examining the relationship between the popular medium of photography and the truth of memories often captured within, Stezaker creates unfamiliar hybrids where there was once a homely and familiar warmth. Through such dissociation, his unified images strongly exude sensations of the uncanny.

Juxtaposing the vain, beauty obsessed culture of Hollywood and the violent destruction of artistic ownership; Stezaker’s work is at once haunting, beautiful, perverse and compelling. Until 18 March.

Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, Aldgate East, E1 7QX www.whitechapel.org

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