John Stezaker: Spell

The Approach presents Spell, a solo exhibition by John Stezaker celebrating the gallery’s 20-year working relationship with the artist. The exhibition brings together two new bodies of work, the Spell and Life Room series, alongside Stezaker’s ongoing Mask series (1982 – Present).

Created during the emergence from lockdown, the Spell series is inspired by images of animal/human hybrids in Classical mythology and fairytales and their associated themes of magical enchantment and metamorphosis. By cutting silhouettes from his preferred source imagery of 1950s publicity portraits of film stars, Stezaker imposes his cutouts onto natural history illustrations. These contemporaneous illustrations of invertebrates and their aqueous underworlds are used as metaphors for the instability of human identity, through interspecies hybrids and gender fluidity.