John Stezaker
Marriage (film portrait collage) LXXIV, 2012, Blind II, 2006, Mask CVL, 2012 and Night I, 2011
On loan to the exhibition Maske at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany
30.05.2019—25.08.2019
Curated by: Barbara Scheuermann
People have always been fascinated by masks in all eras and cultures. When placed upon the face, a mask changesits wearer into someone or something new while simultaneously offering protection and connecting the individual with the outer world.
Especially in the visual arts of modernism, in the movements of Dada, Surrealism and Expressionism, there was great interest in masks. Artists such as Hannah Höch,Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Meret Oppenheim and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff took up the theme repeatedly. After the art of modernism, it is the art of our present era that focusses with remarkable frequency on the mask and its paradoxical possibilities of revelation and concealment, of disguiseand (digital) self-optimization, thereby treating themes of particular importance in a society which generates newfaces non-stop in both the real and virtual realms.
This exhibition of international modern and contemporaryart turns its attention to the masked individual as well asto the performative act of the individual wearing a mask inits social and political context. With high-quality loans andsome new works produced for it specifically, the exhibition covering more than 850 square meters inquires into how artists integrate and transform characteristics and issues associated with masks in their own creative production.
The collages by John Stezaker originate from the Kervahut—Collection Laurent Fiévet.