John Stezaker
British Conceptual artist John Stezaker (b. 1949) is known for his distinctive, often deceptively simple, collages. He has been making art since the 1970s, but achieved prominence relatively recently.
In 2011, he had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and, in 2012, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, even though he does not take photographs.
Stezaker says collage is about ‘stuff that has lost its immediate relationship with the world’ and involves ‘a yearning for a lost world’. A collector, he works from an archive of out-of-date images — mostly old film stills, vintage actor head shots, and antique postcards. These images come in standard sizes and are highly conventionalised — all variations on themes.
Art critic David Campany says, Stezaker ‘is drawn to that very slim space between convention and idiosyncrasy.’
In addition to collages, Lost World includes poignant found-object-sculptures: a selection of antique mannequin hands, offering a repertoire of gestures. There’s also a film, Crowd, presenting hundreds of film stills of crowd scenes, each for one frame only, in a bewildering blur.
Geoffrey Batchen (born 1956, Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian art historian. Assistant Professor, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, 1991–1996; Associate Professor, Art and Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1996–2001; Professor of Art History: City University of New York Graduate Center, New York City, 2002–2010; Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 2010–2019.Much of Batchen's work as a professor and curator focuses on the history of photography. Since 2020, Batchen has been Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford. His curated exhibitions have been shown at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro; the New England Regional Art Museum in Amridale, Australia; the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; the National Media Museum in Bradford, England; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, Germany; the Izu Photo Museum in Shizuoka, Japan; the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik; the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand; the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, NZ; and the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Australia.