Richard Gray Gallery
875 N Michigan Ave
Suite 2503
312.642.8877
This event has passed.
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John Stezaker, Muse (Film Portrait Collage) V, 2008, Courtesy Richard Gray Gallery.
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Sep 11, 2009 – Oct 23, 2009
Mondays–Fridays (10am–5:30pm)
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It seems so simple at first: cut or combine salvaged old photographs. John Stezaker has used variants of this method since the 1970s, but his works consistently have an elegant wit and a beguiling, even haunting, presence that other artists with an itch for collage are hard-pressed to match. In the Marriage series, Stezaker merges halves of male and female head-shots from Hollywood's golden age to create uncanny hybrids. In other works, he excises part of the photograph, leaving what appears like a void or blank screen within the scene. The effects are most complex when Stezaker layers a postcard over a black-and-white film still, a dual act of trauma and supplementation that both obscures and adds to the original image.
