The uniting factor in IPCNY’s New Prints 2011/ Autumn exhibition, was an acute awareness of prints, not as the disembodied free-floating images of Walter Benjamin’s theorizing, but as physically present, even demanding, entities. Including the work of some 51 artists, from the eminent Royal Academician Norman Ackroyd (a beautiful, atmospheric etching of the looming rocks of Stac an Armin off the Scottish coast) to current graduate students, the show made links across generations and hemispheres. Alex Katz, Joan Snyder, and William Kentridge all contributed impeccable, professionally printed works, but most things were printed and published by the artists themselves. Brooklyn was well represented, but so was Lawrence, Kansas and suburban Detroit, as well as Poland, Australia, and the UK.
Sigmar Polke was never just working with the image; he was always working on the object, and his photographs do what great art does – represent a subject by embodying its essence in the art object.
Concurrent exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago examine the very different roles that printed images can adopt in wartime: one is a historical survey of prints depicting the experience of war; the other is the first major American exhibition of posters created by the Soviet TASS agency—one for each day of the Soviet engagement against Germany in World War II.
By Josh Bricker
In a set of twenty-year old etchings, George Condo channeled Picasso, Miles Davis, and Saturday morning cartoons.
By S.E. Smith
The Blanton Museum digs into its collection to survey the art of the portrait, from Charles V to Farrah Fawcett.
By Jay Clarke
The politics of geography and process intersect across borders and decades in the thoughtful and thought-provoking exhibition on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) “Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now.” Drawn entirely from MoMA’s permanent collection, the exhibition points to MoMA’s slow and steady effort to dismantle its reputation as a bastion of high Modernism and to incorporate broader definitions of global indigenous modernisms.
By John Ganz
An exhaustive and ambitious showcase for MoMA’s extensive collection of German Expressionist prints, containing some 250 works by more than fifty artists: iconic woodcuts, intaglio prints, drawings, posters, paintings, illustrated books and magazines, from die Brücke through Neue Sachlichkeit.
This comprehensive exhibition, including ten of Redon’s twelve lithographic portfolios, reveals him as a fundamentally graphic artist who not only exploited the practical reproductive potential of print but also found that the rigors of black and white encapsulated his dark visions with unique intensity.
Nicola López churns rigid industrial forms into swirling organic masses in her recent monoprints on view at Pace Prints.
By Chaewon Kim
As she has since 1999, Airan Kang continues to extend the boundary of her own work by adopting new technology. Her work takes books as its subject matter, to explore the duality of reality and virtuality, actuality and representation and the epistemological confusion arising on the border between them.
Dutch artist Annesas Appel is in the process of re-envisioning the covers of the 429 books that comprise her personal library. In one project she is organizing them according to color and in the other by the letters in their titles.
In these photogravures, based on McElheny’s photographs of the chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera House, the subject are in some places recognizable as earthly objects, but elsewhere could almost be traces of explosions, or, in the artist’s words, “galaxies inhabiting the universe.”
Polly Apfelbaum’s recent prints with Durham Press exhibit her characteristic chromatic exuberance—as she as said, “I can’t imagine too much color.”
By Faye Hirsch
Würth’s latest feat is a nine-part portfolio of engravings that stem from his recent extensive investigation of decorative ornament books in various European archives. Here we see his signature style, in images composed of a spare, well-controlled line that seems to breathe on the page, and plenty of unmarked areas that feel nonetheless inhabited, a combination that imparts to every sheet a subtle vitality.
Carolyn Thompson, whose work is largely concerned with the visual presentation of text, has taken Truman Capote’s short story “Music for Chameleons” and blacked out everything with the exception of rectangles where a colour has been referenced in the story, offering windows of coloured light in an otherwise black void. Black Mirror encourages the private one-to-one intimate engagement of handling and turning each sheet in turn, a metaphor itself for the fragility of existence.
American Alphabet is a project more than twenty years in the making. Cottingham’s 26 letters are a collection, salvaged from a variety of mid-century American commercial signs; most are neon, a handful are molded plastic.Cottingham describes them as “portraits of odd, colorful characters I found hanging out downtown.”
The process behind Carsten Höller’s Birds and Canaries poses challenging ethical questions about what it means to be a creator. For centuries the goal of artists was to represent nature; many even attempted to locate divinity there. Höller has gone further, edging into the realm of Bio Art by generating his own species, and the knowledge that his birds were born to be extinct adds a tragic character to their portraits.
Witho Worms photographs coal slagheaps in Northern Europe and then, using coal from the site, makes contact carbon prints from his negatives. The prints are thus both image and substance, icon and index of the place. These are elegiac landscapes documenting the loss of nature and the death of industry.
The nine floral etchings of Escapades are all personal inventions—none was drawn from life. Smith neither mocks the floral cliché nor embraces it. These nine blooms are in various stages of maturity—some flaunt a spectacular mane of petals, some are gone to seed.
In his new prints Richard Woods plays with the language of real and artificial, which is such a signature aspect of his DIY-inspired work. Here, a sheet of plywood shutter board provides printed woodgrain into which cartoonish representations of wood, such as one might see in The Simpsons, are laid.
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.
Wallpaper is constantly adapting to fashion, economies and society. This book describes its development from single sheets to paper rolls, from hand printing to mechanical rotary printing, from a luxury affordable only by the elite to a product for everyone. At Prangins, roughly 100 different motifs were found, dating back over the course of 150 years.
The book, and by extension the print, was critical to Mallarmé‘s most revolutionary projects. In her recent study, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, The Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture, Anna Sigrídur Arnar convincingly argues that the writer both informed, and was informed by, the transformation of printmaking and book culture to a much greater extent than has been previously acknowledged.
“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.
What happens when arguments about the nature of representation become the thing being represented? Primary Information is an imprint best known for the hands-off fidelity of its reprints of critical art writing of the 60s and 70s. Its anthology of writings from the 1980s periodical REAL LIFE, however, is an editorial creation with interesting implications.
Visual culture has never figured prominently in accounts of Early Modern England, but Malcolm Jones’ new book uncovers a secret history of image use (if not image creation) that permeated the world of Shakespeare and Johnson.
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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.
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).
