Old Mask (I-VIII)

British artist John Stezaker is preoccupied with the seduction of images. Utilising classic movie stills, vintage postcards, book illustrations, and portrait photography, Stezaker creates collages that give old material new meaning. By manipulating, superimposing, and slicing two incongruous pictures together, the artist creates unique works that expose the subversive force of his found images. This is the first time a complete set of such collages by the artist will be offered at auction.

In a similar vein to Surrealism, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and utilises them as ‘readymades’. His famed Old Mask series fuses the profiles of elder sitters with grottos, waterfalls, and hamlets, creating images of eerie beauty that dissociate the familiarity of portraiture to create sensations of the uncanny. By coupling the genres of portraiture and landscape, Stezaker points to a disjointed harmony where the irreconciliation of difference both complements and detracts from the whole. In his collaged images, identities—and our idealisations of them—become reframed and renewed, inviting new interpretation at every glance. In such a manner, Stezaker’s work challenges our preconceptions and the viewer’s relationship to the photographic image: as a documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of identification.