Galleries: Stezaker landscape and nude collages displayed at University of the Arts

Though he started out as the youngest member of the first British Conceptual Art group in the 1960s, London-based artist John Stezaker quickly gravitated back to picture-making, first appropriating media images and, later, film-derived ones in his collages. He is perhaps best known for his series "Marriage," collage portraits in which he cuts and overlaps two Hollywood publicity shots of two film stars to create one familiar but also strangely distorted face (his closest American counterpart would be Cindy Sherman).

Stezaker has occasionally strayed from cinematic imagery over the last three decades, though. His exhibition at the University of the Arts' Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery concentrates on his lesser-known "Bridge" collages of found vintage topographic images and the anatomical nudes of his "Expulsion" and "Fall" series.

Stezaker's juxtapositions of village scenes and landscapes require a much closer eye than his "Marriage" portraits. They're not amusing or quickly gratifying in the way that his faces of film stars are, but their stillness and seamlessness are uncanny and mesmerizing. (More than once, these uneventful but slightly unnatural everyday scenes reminded me of the 1960 British science fiction film Village of the Damned.) Sometimes it's difficult to tell where Stezaker has joined his images, or if the image you see is, in fact, more than one picture. His curiously conjoined nude bodies are entertaining, but they're not as original as his other series.

Unlike the "Marriage" portraits - which, though composed of vintage photographs, look contemporary - Stezaker's landscape and nude collages give the impression of having been made in the early 20th century. Max Ernst's five-pamphlet collage book Une semaine de Bonté, published in Paris in 1934 (and reprinted in paperback by Dover), comes to mind.

What she loves

Roses, full-blown and tinged pink with thinned acrylic, are another.