Richard Gray Gallery (Chicago) is pleased to announce “The Truth of Masks“, an exhibition of new collages by John Stezaker. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and presents the most comprehensive U.S. gallery exhibition of the artist’s collages to date.
“The Truth of Masks” draws from several strains of the artist’s work, all united through meticulous juxtaposition. Glamorous silver screen headshots and film stills are laid beneath vintage colored postcards of the idyllic English landscape.
Loving couples and glossy film stars are transfigured by bridges, trees and oceans. These recombinations pose more questions than answers, drawing relationships between seemingly incompatible images that nonetheless find surrealistic resolution.
In the series titled “Double Shadows”, Stezaker complicates the reading of an image by placing a cut-out silhouette over an inverted scene, resulting in a visually confusing yet intuitively coherent arrangement of line and form. Throughout his work Stezaker pinpoints the tension of opposites to achieve elusive and otherworldly effects.
Stezaker transforms his photographs through alterations, deletions, inversions and juxtapositions, finding pictorial allegiances among far-flung sources. As Michael Bracewell notes, the core of Stezaker’s practice is the “hybridization of second-hand images” in which divergent cultural associations are mutated and re-directed. They become, in effect, “transmissions of a Mass Age dream world.”
John Stezaker: The Truth of Masks
05.11.2015 – 12.12.2015
Images courtesy of John Stezaker
Discover: www.richardgraygallery.com
