John Stezaker: Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa gathers three decades of John Stezaker's (b. 1949) central methods, the silkscreen and the single exacting cut, around a 2010 exhibition at The Approach, London, that reads his practice through voids and apertures rather than doubled images.

The book unites silkscreens on canvas from the early 1990s with film-still collages made between the 1990s and 2009, illustrated in full color with installation photographs from the London gallery. Ridinghouse published the 40-page softcover in 2010 for the exhibition (29 January – 21 March 2010), with an essay by Michael Bracewell tracing "tabula rasa" as a term Stezaker first applied in the mid-1980s to collages with rhomboid holes cut into landscape photographs and film stills, an aperture that, in the newer work, opens onto another image entirely.

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 Fumetti and One on One.