John Stezaker: Shadow 1, 2014, silkscreen, 57.5 by 76 inches, courtesy of the artist and Petzel.
Shadows loom large in John Stezaker’s new works. Derived from ’40s and ’50s B-movie film stills, these prints on canvas render the actors in flat, heavy black ink, the background sets in disquieting gray-blues or orange washes. A recurring theme for Stezaker since the ’70s, the silhouette paradoxically heightens the figures’ presence. Also on view is Blind, Stezaker’s latest film, a collection of midcentury film stills projected at the rate of 24 per second, at which speed the eye cannot distinguish individual images. In a 2013 review, Mark Prince wrote that in Stezaker’s films, “He liberates himself from his usual painstaking attention to the individual print into a realm of pure, exhilarating effect.”