Nude and Landscape

A catalog that reads the British collagist John Stezaker (b. 1949) against art-historical tradition (landscape painting and the nude) rather than the cinematic imagery his found-image work is best known for.

Centered on works from the 1980s onward, when Stezaker turned from the culture of the image to the nature of the image, the book presents his Bridge collages and the anatomical nudes of the Fall and Expulsion series, including many works never previously shown. Most telling is its inclusion of unaltered found images: postcards and plates so close to the finished collages that only the absence or presence of the artist's cut distinguishes them, laying the methodology bare. Published by Ridinghouse with the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery for the exhibition curated by Sid Sachs at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia (October 13 – November 19, 2011), later restaged at Petzel Gallery, New York (2013). With texts by Elizabeth Manchester and Sachs, and a conversation between Stezaker and William Horner.

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. The library also holds the Rubell Family Collection volume on his work.