John Stezaker: Fumetti
Fumetti is the catalog for a 2008 exhibition of the same name by the British collagist John Stezaker (b. 1949), in which vintage film-annual publicity portraits are grafted into monstrous double-faced hybrids.
Rather than the aged bromides of his best-known film-still series, Stezaker works here from glossy 1950s and '60s film-annual star portraits, splicing their perfected hair and makeup into uncanny composite faces. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König published the 112-page hardcover in 2009 for the exhibition at GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (30 August – 9 November 2008), with essays by Barry Schwabsky and David Lillington. The book reproduces the Fumetti series alongside excerpts from twelve further Stezaker series its title borrows the Italian fumetti tradition of comics built from photographs rather than drawings.
Stezaker came to prominence among the British conceptualists of the 1970s and received the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2012, following his 2011 Whitechapel Gallery retrospective. He is represented by The Approach, London, and Petzel Gallery, New York, and the library holds several other Stezaker titles, including Tabula Rasa and Film Still.
