Through repetition, fragmentation and superimposition John Stezaker disrupts existing narratives within images to invent new disjointed, dreamlike scenarios; a preoccupation that has continued throughout his practice spanning four decades. Stezaker arrived to collage in the 1970s with his Photoroman series, which were made from cutouts of Spanish and Italian romantic picture stories printed in glossy magazines. Stezaker intervened in the narratives by shifting the protagonist or restaging the story sequence. The recurring motif of a couple and a third person in the background—entering through a door, or as a lingering shadow—suggests moments of tension, secrecy or deception creeping into the romantic narratives. There is a way of seeing Stezaker’s collage work as an intersection of shadows, if one considers how the artist’s work is mostly comprised from combinations of film images. Since the 1980s Stezaker has worked with fewer fragments to create his collages, which primarily use two existing images to make a third image (such as the Mask series, which overlays old postcards of landscapes on found black and white film stills), or sometimes simply altering a single image by cutting out a part of it (such as the Assisted Readymade series). Recently moving to live next to the sea has awakened the artist to colour, which he has reintroduced to his practice for the first time in many years (as in his latest Double Shadow series). In these works, the contours of the figures of masculinity and femininity, so sharply delineated in 1950s Hollywood images, are dissolved into strange and sometimes monstrous hybrids; uneasy pairings that seem to hover between worlds. John Stezaker (b.1949, Worcester, UK) lives and works in London and St. Leonards on Sea.