John Stezaker: Siren Song

The Approach presents a modest and intimate new exhibition in The Annexe by the seminal British artist John Stezaker.

John Stezaker’s collages dig deep into our unconscious imaginations. Using found historical printed matter ranging from film portraits, film stills, old postcards and particularly for this body of work, old Hollywood fan magazines, Stezaker constructs new images to forge suggested narratives and disjointed, dreamlike scenarios.

This group of collages represent a rare period of colour in Stezaker’s work. They were the result of setting up a studio on the South Coast of England, overlooking the sea. Over a number of years, the light and sense of colour, at first disconcertingly alien to his interest in shadow and darkness, gradually seduced him. The focus of these colour collages emerged from imagery of the archetypal female siren: a figure forever dissolving into the sea. The song of the sirens is incessant, its call throbs, like the tide washing in and out from the shore. Stezaker sees this new series as echoing the ebbs and flows of the collaged image itself.