JOHN STEZAKER

Masks

This exhibition catalog from Stezaker’s recent show in London includes eighteen collages that focus on the British artist’s fascination with the hidden face. As the artist explains it, the masks are “a way of negotiating a threshold between the living and the dead, which in a way is what I think all art is trying to do, it’s trying to reanimate the dead.” By meticulously placing found vintage postcard images of landscapes and animal life over the features of little-known actors from Hollywood’s golden era, Stezaker creates new, almost shocking, images filled with imagined narrative possibilities. Extensive essay by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith.

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David Thorpe

Imagine a hand-made fantasy sci-fi utopia lost in a forest wilderness, a land that seems designed in a collaboration between Isaac Asimov, William Morris and Henry David Thoreau. This thoroughly original world is created by the young British artist David Thorpe, whose work is beautifully presented in this exhibition catalog from the Museum Kurhaus Kleve. Thorpe’s pseudo-botanical watercolors are stunning in their technical perfection, engrossing in their graceful detail; his room-filling sculptural installations envelop the viewer in strangely familiar settings that reference cultural and art history, like the 16th-century Lebenstreform movement, in entirely new ways. With essays in English and German by Guido de Werd, Roland Monig, Tom Morton and Susan L. Stoops.

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