The art of John Stezaker is one of tiny but telling adjustments. With deadpan wit, he changes found photographs and illustrations (typically by cutting away sections of the object, or by introducing a second, disjunctive image into the pictorial field) so as to transform the familiar into a source of wonder, or uncanny horror. This retrospective includes famous works such as his Masks series: portrait photographs overlaid with postcards of rocky landscapes in which the faces ‘cave in’ so that they resemble the cavity-ridden skulls of Baroque vanitas painting. It also showcases his more understated experiments with image fragmentation; the Third Person Archive project, in which the minute staffage figures from an illustrated encyclopaedia are cut out and brought centre stage, is a masterpiece of detached observation.

Stezaker is at his most effective when the intention behind his alterations is not immediately obvious. In The Trial (1980), a film-still photograph of a courtroom scene is combined with a postcard, which shows the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge. The conjunction at first seems arbitrary. Then you notice the visual echo between the oval created by the bridge reflected in the water and the wide-open eyes of the actors, and instantly the bridge metamorphoses into a giant eye, staring back at you. Whose eye creates this image, the artist seems to ask, yours or mine?

Sometimes it is tempting to detect a political agenda in operation. Marriage I (2006), for example, which splices together headshots of a male and female film star, reveals, in the contrast between moody lighting and soft focus, the way in which the camera’s treatment of the human face divides along gender lines. Yet critique is incidental to Stezaker’s purpose. The tang of glamour that attaches to his found portraits survives the work of his scalpel. His art, like the imagery it cannibalises, is alluring, elegant, and empty.

Until Mar 18

TOM BALFE