In her debut solo show at David Krut Projects, British artist Kate McCrickard showed recent paintings and prints incorporating images of young children. While not denying its emotional appeal, McCrickard sees her subject matter pragmatically: “Children fit nicely into the formats I like,” she says. “It’s about composition. A tall gangly adult wouldn’t do it.” Read more.
This review of “Giorgio Morandi: Lines of Poetry” at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London appears in the May-June issue of Art in Print (Vol.3, No.1). To download and access all articles, reviews and news please log in if you are a member, or subscribe. Subscriptions start at just $38. Art in Print is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation and relies on your support.
This review of “Bonnie Marin: What are you scared of?” at the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba in Winnipeg appears in the May-June issue of Art in Print (Vol.3, No.1). To download and access all articles, reviews and news please log in if you are a member, or subscribe. Subscriptions start at just $38. Art in Print is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation and relies on your support.
Press materials explain that Wade Guyton’s midcareer survey exhibition, “OS,” is an acronym for “operating system,” which we’re to understand as a nod to contemporary technology and to Guyton’s manipulation of it. However the “OS” could equally well stand for “occupying space,” an implication that grounds Guyton’s objects in the tangible environment at the Whitney Museum.
This review of “Louise Bourgeois: Between the Lines” at the ETH Prints and Drawings Collection in Zurich appears in the March-April issue of Art in Print (Vol. 2, No. 6). To download and access all articles, reviews and news please login if you are a member or subscribe. Subscriptions start at just $38. Art in Print is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation and relies on your support.
The Artists’ Laboratory is an ongoing series of events at the Royal Academy of Arts, whose goal is to offer Academicians a chance to open up their practice, take risks and explore fresh ideas, and to show the public less familiar aspects of their work. Stephen Chambers, a painter and experienced printmaker, made a singular work specifically for the space.
By M. Brian Tichenor, Raun Thorp
Displacement, memory and a keen yearning for order are the key themes running through the retrospective exhibition, “Zarina: Paper Like Skin.” The 50 years of work on view offers compelling commentary on a life lived in exile and catalogs a remarkable breadth of technique and a highly developed abstract language. Read more.
There are prints of Bruce Conner’s that become gently graphed onto one’s visual cortex if given enough viewing time. The effect is fleeting, but unmistakable, and it’s what gives this exhibition its title, “Afterimage.”
“Material Assumptions” is a provocation to reconsider paper—specifically handmade paper, and its potential to support, hold and challenge form. The exhibition was developed through an independent study graduate course at Chicago’s Columbia College led by Jessica Cochran, who with co-curators Elizabeth Isakson-Dado, Hannah King, and C.J. Mace, invited more than a dozen artists to imagine new artworks to be made from abaca and cotton paper by graduate students at Columbia.
In a burst of experimental creativity in the late 1950s, the West Baffin Eskimo Co-Operative in Cape Dorset grew from a single room craft shop to an important print studio. Its impact in terms of cultural exchange form the focus of the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s traveling exhibition, “Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic.”
This review of Serena Perrone’s Maintaining a Safe Distance and Living to Tell appears in the May-June issue of Art in Print (Vol.3, No.1). To download and access all articles, reviews and news please log in if you are a member, or subscribe. Subscriptions start at just $38. Art in Print is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation and relies on your support.
By M. Brian Tichenor, Raun Thorp
David Musgrave’s finely wrought drawings investigate transmutation: his “plane” and “golem” drawings depict common materials—folded and torn paper, children’s string constructions—arranged and charged with figurative power. In his new set of prints, Musgrave extends the mimetic prowess of these meticulous trompe l’œils, blurring the line between abstraction and figuration.
Jürgen Partenheimer describes the process of making prints as if he is discovering another new landscape: ”Like atolls, islands and the jetties of foreign/landscapes, they emerge from furrowed/ ranks. Evidence and traces/ an archaeology of imagined pictures,/ exposed and ready for printing, /crowning their presence.” Read more.
These prints mark Gert and Uwe Tobias’ first lithographs and first project with Galerie Sabine Knust. Best known for their large-scale woodcuts, the Tobias twins have drawn extensively on their cultural heritage, incorporating the decorative properties and materials of Romanian folk-art as well as the twisted gothic fantasies associated with Transylvania.
Tobias Till is a young artist whose work can be seen as following in the grand British tradition of the urban color linocut. Most of his prints are large-scale affairs stuffed with multiple narratives and specific landmarks identifying corners of London.
Prints may have grown ever larger, brighter, flashier over the past decades, but this small, quirky, black-and-white etching was one of the most discussed new releases at the IFPDA Print Fair in November. It is a testament to the fascination that can still be exerted by a few square inches of deftly handled ink on paper. Read more.
Willie Cole’s art is universal yet profoundly personal. He transforms conventional objects into works of art that conjure collective memories while referencing the artist’s personal identity. Each of the five intaglio impressions of ironing boards in his recent series Five Beauties Rising is a poetic document, recording both the singular existence of a specific object and the larger historical narrative it represents.
In Kiki Smith’s notebook-size etchings clouds roil and loom over choppy waters. The rich tonal quality of the gray scale in these prints comes from the aquatint process used to produce them. After the printing, Smith painted the boulders and crags in the foreground with watercolors, giving the hard forms a many-hued softness.
Though Simmons has only recently started to make prints, he is a natural. His interest in the troubled re-presentation of the commonplace and his monochromatic natural strengths of printmaking.
Shazia Sikander’s art is one of assimilation—the integration of incongruent parts into something coherent, though not homogenous. This happens on multiple levels: the technical; the personal; and the formal.
Bound in pink satin and stamped with a grand gold cartouche, Gert & Uwe Tobias: Dresdener Paraphrasen / Dresden Paraphrases might be mistaken for a reverent tribute to the frothy Rococo of Dresden’s prewar city center, were it not for the small mutant chicken, perched on a curled corner of the cartouche, missing its torso and looking a little dazed.
By Armin Kunz
Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge, the remarkable exhibition organized by Susan Dackerman offered a timely investigation into the roots of our visual, informational culture. The show’s stupendous catalogue explores the function of the image within the natural sciences in early modern Europe, arguing that, beyond their role as descriptions, images actually made knowledge visible.
The British Museum and The Museum of Modern Art harbor some of the most astonishing print collections in the world, and both have now produced appealing books that aim to be user-friendly introductory guides to the presumptively inaccessible world of prints. That prints are perceived as requiring special knowledge to appreciate is one of the great ironies of the medium whose original raison d’être was to be both popular and populist. Both authors mix obvious choices (Dürer and Rembrandt for the BM, Picasso and Warhol for MoMA) with quirkier and less familiar works. There is, as the saying goes, something new for everyone
On view at the International Print Center New York earlier this fall was an exhibition of prints defined not by a shared theme or by formal congruities, but by a common relationship to the renowned master printer Craig Zammiello. Zammiello, who specializes in intaglio processes, brought technical ingenuity and creativity to each of the projects on view. The exhibition pays homage to the collaborative process that is part and parcel of printmaking today.
The exhibition catalogue “Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard,” offers readers the chance to view a rare selection of paintings, photographs and prints by seven post-Impressionist artists who established their reputations at the end of the 19th century. The book adds to a growing body of scholarship on the relationships between fine art and photography, each medium informing the other with unique ways of seeing.
By Mark Pascale
Leah Lehmbeck, Associate Curator at the Norton Simon Museum and organizer of the exhibition, has assembled a group of expert authors who together create a groundbreaking portrait of a dynamic period and place, and to some extent rewrite the accepted histories of 20th-century art.
By Jane Kent
For 30 years awareness of these hazards has been growing. Around the world, artists, printers and manufacturers have been busily creating new ways to produce old effects, applying new technologies to old problems, inventing their own recipes and methodologies. Until now, however, most of this information has traveled in various forms, by word of mouth, video or by PDF. Pogue’s book, which he describes as a “studio manual,” fills an essential need, offering a comprehensive, current and well-organized look at new printmaking technologies and, most importantly, the safer use of these technologies for the print practitioner.
Since 1964, the Museum of Modern Art has presented four ambitious surveys of international contemporary prints, each under a different head curator, each more ambitious than the last. The catalogues have grown from something that would fit in your pocket without disgruntling your tailor, to the 236-page coffee-table object that accompanies the latest iteration of these surveys, “Print/Out.” Art in Print looks at all four catalogues and how they reflects the exhibition, the era, and the changing fortunes of the artist’s print.
Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life is the elegant companion to last summer’s exhibition of the same name at The Art Institute of Chicago. Thoughtfully and cleverly assembled, the show revealed unexpected uses for prints of the 15th- and 16th-centuries. The catalogue carries on this work and helps to illuminate the ephemeral qualities of print, as well as the more lasting concepts that printed multiples can convey to a broader, contemporary audience.
Alex Katz’ detractors see him as a stylish but ultimately decorative chronicler of a certain kind of privileged American life; his supporters see him as a profound investigator of perception and the emotional resonance of form—Ellsworth Kelly with figures. For those who have yet to stake a position, the Albertina catalogue, covering 64 years and including many of Katz’ most famous images, this beautifully produced catalogue raisonné documenting nearly 500 prints made over 64 years offers a profusion of material for consideration.
