Tears IV, 2018

Miami Beach 2018
Tears IV

Petzel

Painting
Found painting and collage
38.6 x 33.0 （厘米）
15.2 x 13.0 （吋）
The British conceptual artist John Stezaker has been highly influential in the key artistic developments of the last four decades. His formative work in the late 1960s and early 1970s coincided with the resurgence of earlier 20th-century avant-garde practices such as collage and photomontage. In the work for which he has become well known, Stezaker uses various techniques – incisions, excisions, obstructions, reparations, and rotations – to create visual revisions. In his newest series, Tear, Stezaker appropriates the late paintings of Joan Miro in which Miro cut holes into his own painted canvases. Stezaker instead uses an additive technique by adhering an image of one of Miro’s cut holes atop a found portrait or landscape painting. By adding this ‘hole,’ Stezaker in effect nullifies the act of violence of Miro’s original cut while simultaneously creating his own pictorial interruption. The word ‘tear’ used to describe the series is deliberately ambiguous: What appears at first to be a violation is, in fact, a juxtaposition of two different types of pictorial representation.