Impressions From South Africa 1965 to Now examines the social role of prints in a tumultuous time and place as evidenced through the work of 24 artists, 8 artist collectives, and 22 print-producing organizations, from William Kentridge to Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
Paul Gauguin’s woodcuts and monoprints are famous for their radical departure from Western pictorial norms, but a new examination of Gauguin’s first, experimental woodcut series argues that the real radicality of Gauguin’s prints lies not in their ‘originality’, but in the artist’s recognition that originality and authenticity were, in fact, unattainable.
It is Almost That is a coverless, inventive and poignant collection of twenty-six visionary works by women artists and writers, from Charlotte Salomon’s remarkable autobiographical 1940s graphic novel, to a 2011 photo and prose piece by Bhanu and Rohini Kapil, with space between for the comic, the tragic, and the incomplete.
“Printmaking,” Joan Snyder says, “is magical, though a lot of work… You don’t know what you’re going to get.” This book and its attendent exhibition are the first to survey the breadth of Snyder’s printmaking, and they are critical for any understanding of who Snyder is as an artist, revealing a more complex, subtle, and layered body of work than the paintings alone suggest.
