The Approach is pleased to announce the first solo show of John Stezaker in London for eight years.

Stezaker has been centrally influential in a number of developments in art over the last three decades; from Conceptual Art; New Image Art through to the contemporary interest in collage.

Showing first as a part of the British Conceptual Art group in ‘The New Art’, 1972 (The first Hayward Annual), Stezaker’s interest in the concept soon gave way to a long-term dedication to the image, finding new aesthetic allegiances with the image through working with found photographs.

The ‘Third Person’ archive begins in the mid seventies with a probing of these new allegiances – in an encounter with Surrealism. (The ‘Third Person’ archive is a collection of images which were in circulation in the 1920’s and 30’s, at the time of surrealism). Stezaker has described this archive as an opportunity for “time travel”*. Predominantly a collection of incidental figures from topographical photographs, mostly overlooked (even by the original photographer), their isolation is a strange act of retrieval. “I am aware that the people in these pictures have long since been dust in these pre-tarmaced streets”*… “It is like an act of posthumous voyeurism”*, tracing their forgotten journeys in the urban labyrinth.

A number of collage series and collections of image fragments have emerged from the ‘Third Person’ archive e.g. the ‘Over-worlds’ shown in the British Art Show 2000 and elsewhere. The Approach will show some hitherto unseen as well as new works which also have their pictorial source in this archive. It will also be an opportunity to see for the first time some of the original collages from the ‘Fall’ and ‘Cross’ series shown in the ‘Garden’ exhibition of 1996.

* Quoted from ‘Images of Thought’ edited by Yve Lomax, 2001