John (Grenville) Stezaker  is an English Conceptual artist born in 1949; he studied at the Slade School of Art and received a Higher Diploma in 1973. 

John Stezaker’s appropriates found images from classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations and juxtaposes these to create photographic collages. By splicing images together he manipulates their meaning and resonances and examines the notion of ‘photographic truth’ as well as the association photography has with memory and modern culture. His subversive works draw upon the ‘uncanny’ for instance in his Marriage series which places together publicity shots of different celebrities.  The artist interest in Dada and Surrealism is reflecting in the hybrid nature of these works and collage technique.

Solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1973, Lisson Gallery in 1984, at Cubitt Gallery in 1996 and the Kunstverein Freiburg in 2010. In 2011 the artist had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, an exhibition that led him receiving the Deutsche Börse Prize. 

The artist has worked as a tutor at Central St Martins and the Royal College of Art, and is represented by the Approach Gallery.

Glossary

  • Collage

    The two-dimensional form of assemblage made by affixing paper, card, photographs, fabric and other objects to a flat surface. It is often combined with painting and drawing techniques. This technique was first introduced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1912 during their phase of synthetic cubism.

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