John Stezaker: Masks

Concentrating specifically on the portrait, John Stezaker's 'Masks' series reflects the artist's ongoing interest with the hidden face. Stezaker’s long-term fascination with the image is translated into alterations, deletions, visual concordances and juxtapositions of disparate sources, intuitively creating new images and relationships.

Notions of the interior and exterior and blindness are key to Stezaker's 'Masks' series. Found postcard images obscure and replace the subject’s physiognomy – leaving a ‘surround’ of hair, neck and clothes – and cavernous landscapes take the place of facial features to form new characters and meanings.

Accompanying over 60 full-colour illustrations, a text from Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith discusses the imagined narrative possibilities of the artist's superimposed images and collages.