Emma Amos @ Alison Jacques, London - Exhibition spanning a period of nearly five decades of work

Emma Amos

Alison Jacques, London

10 July – 9 August 2025

EMMA AMOS 

Dancing in the Streets, 1986 

© Emma Amos

Spanning a period of nearly five decades of work, this is the first UK solo exhibition of pioneering African American artist EMMA AMOS (b.1937, Atlanta, Georgia; d.2020, New York). In the 1950s, Emma Amos lived in London, studying at the Central School of Art and Design.

Emma Amos combines painting, textiles, and printmaking, often incorporating African fabrics, photo transfers, and vibrant colours. Her work is politically charged and addresses themes of race, gender and identity.

Though under-recognised during much of her career, Emma Amos has gained widespread attention in recent years. Her work was included in the landmark 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, which travelled to Crystal Bridges, Brooklyn Museum, The Broad, LA, and MFA Houston. In 2021, Amos’ major retrospective Emma Amos: Color Odyssey was exhibited at the Georgia Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

An original member of the Guerrilla Girls, art and activism were inseparable for Emma Amos. She was on the editorial board of the feminist publication Heresies, and was the youngest and only woman member of Spiral Group, the significant African-American collective, alongside artists and activists Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and Hale Woodruff.

Before embarking on her career in New York, Emma Amos studied at Central School of Art and Design in London, and completed a diploma in etching. Here, she experienced a cultural and artistic freedom that she was not afforded in the US. She honed her mastery in printmaking and weaving, two mediums that became essential tools in her artistic language, and discovered the pictorial possibilities of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. ‘In London, as an art student’, Emma Amos stated, ‘I had that wonderful feeling of release’.

Born to an established family in segregated Atlanta, Georgia, Amos’ artistic talents were encouraged. She graduated with a degree in Fine Art from Antioch College, Ohio in 1958. Her development as an artist was predicated on her contention that, as a Black woman artist, putting brush to canvas was ‘a political act’.

By layering pigment, print, textiles, African wax prints, photo-transfers and applying paint to unstretched fabric, Emma Amos creates visually rich and conceptually experimental works which grapple with her nation’s complex past, and her personal stake in it. Many of the exhibited works are from Amos’ ‘Falling’ series – dynamic scenes which stage physical and social upheaval. Through such paintings, bell hooks observes, ‘freedom of expression is made more inclusive… In this free world, identities are not static but always changing. Crisscrossing and crossbreeding become mutual practices, and the power to explore and journey is extended to all.’

Emma Amos’ work is held in prominent museum collections including: Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas; The Getty, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; SFMOMA, California; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

ALISON JACQUES

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG

alisonjacques.com

Richard Diebenkorn: Prints from Two Decades @ Crown Point Press Gallery, San Francisco

Richard Diebenkorn 

Prints from Two Decades

Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Through June 30, 2025

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Spade Drypoint, 1982

© Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Coutesy of Crown Point Press

I’m making my drawing in spite of the metal. I think I’m going to make a straight line, and it says, ‘Oh, no you don’t!—Richard Diebenkorn, 1962

Crown Point Press presents Richard Diebenkorn: Prints from Two Decades, a radiant exhibition of prints made by the artist during a series of residencies at the Press between 1980 and 1990. Organized with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Crown Point Executive Director, Valerie Wade, the show takes place on the occasion of the highly anticipated release of Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné of Prints (Yale University Press, 2025), which includes new scholarly essays, more than 850 significantly scaled images, and a richly illustrated chronology of Diebenkorn’s printmaking years. The works on view in the Crown Point Gallery were created in the final decade and a half of the artist’s life, the “high point” in his printmaking oeuvre, writes Starr Figura, Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art. In her essay Richard Diebenkorn, Printmaker, she adds that the objects made during this period “rank among the most extraordinarily luminous and elegantly structured prints ever produced.”

Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) was highly accomplished in printmaking and worked with professional print shops over a period of more than 30 years (1962–1992). Master Printer Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press published a selection of his earliest intaglio prints in 1965 as 41 Etchings Drypoints. “It was Crown Point Press in San Francisco and the intaglio print processes it offered that captivated him the most: etching, drypoint, aquatint, and related techniques for incising an image into a metal printing plate,” Starr Figura adds, which “provided endless horizons for his work.”

In 1980, the artist began his Clubs and Spades series of works on paper containing symbols and heraldic imagery that had fascinated him since he was a young person; the iconography appeared in his prints as early as 1963. A series of intaglio prints made at the Press in which he deployed clubs, spades, and crosses in the early 1980s is “the first occasion,” Starr Figura writes, “when Diebenkorn’s prints start to rival the saturated color, imposing presence, and painterly ambition of his paintings on paper.” Spade Drypoint (1982) evinces his love of the drypoint process with its aggressive lines, while a shimmering aquatint with scraping made the same year, Green Tree Spade, is remarkable for its vividness and texture.

Ne Comprends Pas and Oui, both from 1990, were made during one of his most productive residencies at the Press. Oui, with its floating, broken detritus, marked a return to reversal techniques, which he had experimented with nearly a decade prior in 1981. Emily York, in Magical Secrets about Aquatint: Spit Bite, Sugar Lift and Other Etched Tones Step-by-Step (Crown Point Press, 2008), recalls that Renée Bott made an aquatint reversal of Ne Comprends Pas, which became Oui. “Diebenkorn mainly drew with asphaltum to make Ne Comprends Pas, a predominantly black image in which the drawn forms come through as the white of the paper. After finishing the print, he wondered what it would look like if the lines were dark on light,” writes Emily York.

The very experimental, geometric Passage I and Passage II were made during the same time as Ne Comprends Pas and Oui and were also created with the reversal process. Richard Diebenkorn added a strip of color to Passage I, as he did with his most celebrated print, Green, published in 1986 by the Press. “It wasn’t the first time that Dick had done that,” and “not a lot of artists that I’ve worked with have done that,” says Renée Bott, from a wide-ranging interview conducted by Karin Breuer, Curator in Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and featured in the volumes. “He kept looking at it and…it wasn’t complete to him without adding something.”

The exhibition culminates in the weightless 1990 etchings Domino I and Domino II which are, observes Starr Figura, “among the most richly textured and densely composed images that Diebenkorn had ever produced.” As Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park geometries seem on the brink of dissolving…there is the sense of familiar forms and structures being opened up, loosened, and softened.”

Special Film

A new and special film with the late Kathan Brown and Valerie Wade, and together with Andrea Liguori, Executive Director of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Editor, Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné of Prints, explores the artist’s history with the Press and the “golden era”of printmaking during the 1980s. Andrea Liguori, in a tender interview conducted with Kathan Brown in late 2023, unearths brightly hued paper scraps discovered during filming that the artist had used to construct an iconic print image. The film was produced at Crown Point Press by Matthew Pendergast and is now available on crownpoint.com and diebenkorn.org.

CROWN POINT GALLERY

20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

crownpoint.com

RICHARD DIEBENKORN: PRINTS FROM TWO DECADES

CROWN POINT PRESS, May 23 – June 30, 2025

William Kentridge @ Hauser & Wirth, NYC - "A Natural History of the Studio" Exhibition - Presentation of "Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot"

William Kentridge 

A Natural History of the Studio

Hauser & Wirth, New York

542 West 22nd Street & 443 West 18th Street

1 May - 1 August 2025

William Kentridge

Still from Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, 

Episode 1: A Natural History of the Studio, 2020 - 2024

HD Video, 24 min

© William Kentridge

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

William Kentridge

Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot III, 2012

Hand-woven mohair tapestry

283 x 230 cm / 111 3/8 x 90 1/2 in

Photo: Thys Dullaart

© William Kentridge

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

With ‘A Natural History of the Studio,’ his first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York, renowned South African artist WILLIAM KENTDRIDGE presents his acclaimed episodic film series ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee- Pot’ with more than seventy works on paper integral to its creation and an array of sculptures at 542 West 22nd Street. This immersive exhibition is the first ever to present all the drawings from this filmic masterpiece, hailed by critics as a moving, witty and ultimately wondrous synthesis of the personal and the political, the individual and the universal. Spanning two floors of the gallery’s 22nd Street building, ‘A Natural History of the Studio’ also extends to the gallery’s 18th Street location with a concise survey of Kentridge’s printmakingr practice. 

To mark this occasion, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release a new artist’s book that condenses the essence of ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ through written dialogue and still images. 

William Kentridge

Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (Waterfall), 2021

Charcoal, pastel and coloured pencil on paper

128 x 223 cm / 50 3/8 x 87 3/4 in

Photo: William Kentridge Studio

© William Kentridge

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

William Kentridge

Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot 

(I Look in the Mirror, I Know What I Need), 2020

Tempera paint, charcoal, pastel, coloured pencil, 

dry pigment and collage on paper

250 x 212 cm / 98 3/8 x 83 1/2 in

Photo: Thys Dullaart

© William Kentridge

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

William Kentridge

Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot 

(Set A of 16 drawings), 2020

Charcoal and coloured pencil on paper, 16 drawings

Each: 29 x 40 cm / 11 3/8 x 15 3/4 in approx.

Photo: Thys Dullaart

© William Kentridge

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

Conceived by the artist’s longtime collaborator Sabine Theunissen, the installation design for the first floor of ‘A Natural History of the Studio’ at 22nd Street includes the charcoal drawings used in the animation of ‘Self- Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ and evoke the feeling of being in Kentridge’s working environment with him, a place where the walls hum with inspiration and every surface tells a story. Shot in his Johannesburg studio at the outset of the global COVID-19 pandemic and completed in 2024, the series includes nine thirty-minute episodes that bring viewers inside the artist’s mind. Through a blend of Kentridge’s signature stop-motion technique, live action performance and philosophical dialogue, ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ delves into subjects like Greek mythology, the history of mining in Johannesburg, colonialism in Africa and Soviet absurdities. And here, as in his wider body of work, the seemingly mundane and familiar household coffee pot becomes a stand-in for the artist, an avatar of the art-making process in which a steady flow of ideas is akin to the bubbling of coffee brewing. In several episodes of the series, William Kentridge is joined by collaborators and assistants; in others he is seen debating and squabbling with a series of doppelgängers in a playful externalization of his internal creative struggles. Thus, ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ serves as both a celebration of creativity and a snapshot of Kentridge’s pandemic experience. 

The presentation at Hauser & Wirth follows special previews of ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ at the Toronto International Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival. The complete series of films was first seen in an installation curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in Venice, in conjunction with the 2024 Venice Biennale.

‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ was created and directed by William Kentridge, executive produced by Rachel Chanoff and Noah Bashevkin of The Office Performing Arts + Film, Joslyn Barnes of Louverture Films and the William Kentridge Studio. Walter Murch supervised the editing by South African digital artist Janus Fouché and Kentridge’s regular collaborators Žana Marović and Joshua Trappler. 

William Kentridge

Carrier Pigeon, 2019

Bronze

92.2 x 50 x 95 cm / 36 1/4 x 19 5/8 x 37 3/8 in

Photo: Oriol Tarridas Photography

© William Kentridge

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

William Kentridge

Italics Plus, 2024

Bronze, 43 parts

Overall: 100 x 280 x 28.5 cm / 39 3/8 x 110 1/4 x 11 1/4 in

Photo: Anthea Pokroy

© William Kentridge

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

The second floor of the exhibition explores the relationship between drawing and sculpture in Kentridge’s oeuvre. Among works on view here is a selection of ‘Paper Procession’ sculptures. Made from aluminum panels fixed to a steel armature and hand-painted in vibrant oil paint, these works are based on a series of small-scale paper sculptures Kentridge made from pages of a 19th century accounting journal from the Chiesa di San Francesco Saverio in Palermo, Italy. The works feel like moving sketches—ephemeral yet powerful––and extend Kentridge’s exploration of history, memory and transformation using humble materials to challenge grand narratives. The presentation also includes Kentridge’s bronze ‘glyphs’ –– sculptures of both everyday and arcane objects, words and icons that function together as a sort of visual glossary that can be arranged and re-arranged to construct different sculptural ‘sentences.’ The glyphs began as ink drawings and paper cut-outs that subsequently were cast in bronze and finished with a pitch-black patina evoking the hue of both ink and shadows. These glyphs also make an appearance in the single channel animated video on view titled ‘Fugitive Words’ (2024). The film opens with an overhead view of Kentridge’s hands flipping through the pages of one his many notebooks––a vital part of his creative process and an extension of his studio––where sketches, scores, diagrams, lists and phrases appear. The scene quickly develops into a dreamlike, non-narrative journey through the artist’s mind, where fleeting words, shifting images and even his drawing tools come to life to create an evolving landscape of memory and transformation, all set to Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’ piano trio.

A World in Prints at 18th Street 

‘A Natural History of the Studio’ extends to Hauser & Wirth’s nearby 18th Street location with a selection of thirty prints made by Kentridge over the last two decades. The artist first began printmaking while a student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the medium has been integral to his practice ever since. Kentridge has experimented with a broad range of techniques in this realm, from etching to lithography, aquatint, drypoint, photogravure and woodcut, observing that, ‘Printmaking…became a medium in which I could think, not merely a medium to make a picture... it has not been an adjunct to my other activities, but in many ways, it has been a central thread that has gone through the work I have done in the studio over the last 40 years.’ 

Many of the works on view at 18th Street revisit familiar personal iconography or directly reference other milestone projects, including the films on view at 22nd Street. The image of a typewriter, for example, dominates four print variations on view and is used as a metaphor for communication, historical record-keeping, and bureaucratic authority. Produced with master printmaker Mark Attwood in 2012 and given such titles as ‘The Full Stop Swallows the Sentence’ and ‘Undo Unsay,’ these works on paper are directly connected to Kentridge’s film ‘The Refusal of Time’ (2012), a thirty-minute meditation on time and space, the complex legacies of colonialism and industry, and the artist’s own intellectual life. 

A series of lithographs titled ‘Portraits for Shostakovich’ (2022) was inspired by a 52-minute film made to accompany live performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No.10. Titled ‘Oh To Believe in Another World’ (2022), that project also serves as the subject of episode 8 of ‘Self-Portrait of a Coffee-Pot.’ These colorful prints feature fractured portraits of Soviet intellectuals, members of the cultural avant-garde like the playwright and poet Mayakovsky, and politicians such as Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. 

The presentation at 18th Street also includes four self-portraits. Made in collaboration with Jillian Ross Print in 2023, these works employ photogravure, drypoint, and hand-painting techniques with collaged elements of photographs, drawings, and fragments of text – an approach that in its insistent layering evokes the construction of self and identity as a continual work in process, intertwined with and shaped by socio-political forces. 

HAUSER & WIRTH

542 West 22nd Street & 443 West 18th Street, New York City

www.hauserwirth.com

Richard Serra: The Final Works @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Richard Serra

The Final Works

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Until 26 April 2025

RICHARD SERRA

Casablanca #3, 2022

Hand-applied oil stick, etching ink and silica 

on Igarashi 430gsm handmade paper

Paper and Image: 167.9 x 152.9 cm - 66 1/8 x 60 1/4 inches. 

Edition of 27

© Richard Serra. Courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Marking the first anniversary of Richard Serra’s death at the age of 85, Cristea Roberts Gallery presents the final works made by the artist.

The first complete showing of these works outside the US focuses on two series of prints made using black oil stick. Serra, one of the most significant artists of his generation, was known for monumental steel sculptures. However, his explorations of form, mass and gravity informed every aspect of his art, including his works on paper.

Casablanca 1-6, 2022 and Hitchcock I-III, 2024 mark the culmination of over fifty years of printmaking. Although described as prints, none of these works passed through a press and the methods used are unlike those of traditional printmaking; Serra’s chosen media undermines our understanding of what constitutes an editioned work.

Each work was made using oil stick, a combination of pigment, linseed oil, and melted wax. The mixture was moulded into large cylindrical sticks, then pressed down into a meat grinder and blended in an industrial dough mixer with silica.

The mixture was applied in layers, by a gloved hand, directly onto handmade paper, pushing and rubbing in a downward direction. Each layer required weeks of drying time before an additional coat could be applied. As a result, each impression varies in its construction.

For each work, layer upon layer of black oil stick was built up so that an intensely textured and rich three-dimensional surface emerges, evoking a large void. This imposing effect of black absorbing and reflecting light, dominates Serra’s prints. When making works on paper Serra remained committed to using a single palette of black to investigate weight, stability, and density. 

Richard Serra commented “Black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a larger volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging.”

The mass of black in each work, which almost fills the entire sheets in Casablanca and Hitchcock, is relieved by thin areas of paper that appear to rise or emerge from curved edges and corners. Serra examines tension and gravity through this unequal balance of heavy mass and handmade Japanese paper. The paper support almost appears precarious; each impression of Casablanca, measuring over 150cm in width, weighs nearly 10 kilograms.

Richard Serra was interested in how an artwork not only exists in space but reorientates it. His sculptures created environments that had to be walked through or around to be fully experienced. Serra’s printmaking extends these investigations, interrogating the physical relationship of mass and the flat surface, and the viewers relationship to it.

The exhibition also features examples of earlier uses of black oil stick and etchings by the artist dating from 2004, and a display of the tools used to create these groundbreaking works.

Richard Serra: The Final Works demonstrates how the artist’s radical techniques and exceptional approach to making editions, remains singular in the history of printmaking.

Since presenting the first exhibition in the UK devoted to Serra’s prints in 2013, Cristea Roberts Gallery has continued to exclusively exhibit the artist’s editions in Europe. The works on show were developed by Richard Serra with Gemini G.E.L., an artists’ workshop and publisher in Los Angeles, where Serra made all his editions, a collaboration that lasted for over fifty years.

RICHARD SERRA - BRIOGRAPHY

Richard Serra (1938 - 2024) was born in San Francisco, USA. He lived and worked in New York, and the North Fork of Long Island, and Nova Scotia. From 1957 to 1961 Serra studied at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and from 1961 to 1964 at Yale University, Connecticut, where he worked with Josef Albers on Albers seminal book, Interaction of Color (New Haven, 1963). His first solo exhibition was held at Galleria La Salita, Rome, in 1966 and the Pasadena Art Museum staged his first solo museum exhibition in 1970.

Serra’s large-scale, site-specific sculptures, featuring monumental arcs, spirals, and ellipses can be found all over the world. Selected solo exhibitions and retrospectives include Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel (2017); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2017); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2014); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011); Menil Collection, Houston (2011); Monumenta, Grand Palais, Paris (2008); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (2006); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2005); Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples (2004); Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2003). His works are housed in major collections all over the world.

 

Richard Serra participated in international exhibitions including Documenta, Kassel (1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987); the Venice Biennale (1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013); and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions (1968, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1995, and 2006).

Richard Serra was the recipient of many notable prizes and awards. In 2015, he was awarded Les Insignes de Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, France, and in 2018 he received the J. Paul Getty Medal, which honors extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and support of the arts. Prior to this he was also awarded Orden de las Artes y las Letras de España, Spain in 2008 and Orden pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, Federal Republic of Germany in 2002.

Richard Serra passed away aged 85 on 26 March 2024 in New York, USA.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY, LONDON 

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG 

www.cristearoberts.com 

Related Posts:

In English

Richard Serra: Every Which Way, David Zwirner, New York, November 7 – December 14, 2024

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 13 – August 28, 2011

Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipses, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, September 25, 1997 - June 14, 1998

En Français

Richard Serra : Casablanca, Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris, 14 mars - 30 avril 2024

Richard Serra : Clara Clara, 1983 , Musée du Louvre, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, 14 avril – 3 novembre 2008

Richard Serra: The Final Works

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 13 March - 26 April 2025

Mexican Prints at the Vanguard @ The Met, NYC

Mexican Prints at the Vanguard 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 12, 2024 – January 5, 2025 

Gabriel Fernández Ledesma (Mexican, 1900–1983)

Poster advertising an exhibition of work by young Mexican artists held in the Retiro Park, Madrid (detail), 1929 

Woodcut, letterpress 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 

Gift of Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, 1930 (30.88.1)

Mexican Prints at the Vanguard at The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 691–93, explores the rich tradition of printmaking in Mexico—from the 18th century to the mid-20th century—through works drawn mainly from the Museum’s collection. Among the early works presented are those by Mexico’s best-known printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada, whose depictions of skeletons engaged in different activities helped establish a global identity for Mexican art. Following the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), printmaking proved to be the ideal medium for artists wanting to address social and political concerns and voice resistance to the rise of fascism around the world. Artists also turned to printmaking to reproduce Mexican murals from the 1920s and to create exhibition posters, prints for the popular press, and portfolios celebrating Mexican dress and customs. 

Featuring over 130 works, including woodcuts, lithographs, and screen prints, by artists such as Posada, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Elizabeth Catlett, and Leopoldo Méndez, the exhibition explores how prints were central to artistic identity and practice in Mexico and highlights their effectiveness in addressing social and political issues, a role of the graphic arts that continues today. The bulk of The Met’s expansive collection came through the French-born artist Jean Charlot, whose association with the Museum began in the late 1920s. Charlot donated many of his own prints and works by other artists to The Met, and in the mid-1940s acted on behalf of the Museum to acquire prints in Mexico. 

“This remarkable exhibition evokes the continued resonance of the graphic arts in Mexico and illuminates treasures of The Met collection—many of which have never been exhibited before,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Reflecting a vibrant tradition that is deeply imbued with political and social history, these works exemplify the extraordinary power of print as a medium and the importance of creative expression as response to specific cultural moments.”

Mark McDonald, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met, said, “As a long-preferred medium for artists to challenge and support social and political issues, printmaking provides a rich visual record of Mexican history. This exhibition activates The Met’s unique ability to explore this visual history through its extensive holdings of Mexican prints in addition to highlighting a key moment in the Museum’s collecting practice.”

Among the exhibition’s featured works are prints that survive in unique impressions and have not been published, offering a singular glimpse into the breadth of printmaking in Mexico. These include a group of posters from the late 1920s that address public health, workers’ rights, and education. The collection demonstrates The Met’s early interest in Mexican art and culture at a time when there was growing international interest in the subject.

Mexican Prints at the Vanguard is presented in six chronologically organized sections across three galleries. It begins with an overview of the history of Mexican printmaking, emphasizing how prints were central to artistic and political expression in Mexico especially during the 20th century, and a description of how a large number of works came to be in The Met collection through the French-born artist Jean Charlot, who spent most of the 1920s in Mexico. 

The exhibition then explores early printmaking in Mexico starting in the mid-18th century, tracking its development through the end of the 19th century and demonstrating the range of purposes for which prints were used. The first prints created in Mexico in the mid-16th century were woodcuts and engravings for book illustration and devotional purposes; this continued until the mid-19th century, when lithography became the principal medium. In the second half of the 19th century, printed political caricature developed as a powerful tool to defend freedom of thought.

A section about artist José Guadalupe Posada and his contemporaries broadens the narrative of the growth of printmaking in the early 20th century and its many visual manifestations. Posada has often been described as the progenitor of printmaking in Mexico, with a career that spanned a period of tremendous social and political change. 

Next, the exhibition focuses on the Mexican Revolution as the defining event of modern Mexico that tremendously impacted society and artistic expression. The Revolution became the focus of social and political struggle that is most prominently reflected through prints, and interpretations of the Revolution continued to be refined and reinterpreted long after it ended. This section looks at the conflict from its origins and as memory, as well as how it became a reference point for social and political activism in Mexico that continues to this day.

In the post-Revolutionary period, prints became the essential medium for promoting artistic, social, and political values. Public art was key to a state-sponsored effort to establish a new cultural identity. Mural painting has received the most attention—mainly because it is an ambitious undertaking and because of the fame of the artists involved, such as Diego Rivera—but an equally remarkable revival of printmaking took place. Prints showcase Mexico’s political, social, and artistic depth. Woodcuts in particular represented new ideologies related to democracy, education, and the avant-garde. 

A section dedicated to the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Workshop of Popular Graphic Art), established in Mexico City in 1937, illuminates the workshop’s development into one of the important printmaking collectives of the 20th century, producing striking posters, flyers, and portfolios that address mainly social and political issues. 

The exhibition concludes with a look at printmaking in the 1940s and beyond, as the preoccupations of the artists associated with the Taller de Gráfica Popular slowly shifted to accommodate middle-class consumption. This section highlights materials including portfolios of limited-edition fine art prints that focus on Mexican dress and customs and children’s book illustrations to evoke the paths along which printmaking developed during the 1940s, often targeting an international market.

Printmaking continues to be widely practiced in Mexico. Inspired by earlier traditions and often referencing revolutionary heroes, symbols, and themes, new communities of artists continue to create remarkable posters and flyers for public display. 

Mexican Prints at the Vanguard is curated by Mark McDonald, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Met.

The Met Fifth Avenue

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028 

www.metmuseum.org

Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking 

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London 

19 June – 3 November 2024 

Hiroshi Yoshida 

El Capitan, 1925 

Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum

Hiroshi Yoshida 

Kumoi Cherry Trees, 1926. 

Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum 

Dulwich Picture Gallery brings together artworks by the Yoshida family, a Japanese artistic dynasty including Yoshida Hiroshi, Fujio, Tōshi, Hodaka, Chizuko and Ayomi. The first of its kind in the UK – and Europe more widely – this exhibition shines a spotlight on three generations of woodblock print artists and trace the evolution of Japanese printmaking across two centuries.

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950)

The exhibition opens with work by Yoshida Hiroshi, one of Japan’s greatest artists. A pioneer of the shin hanga movement, he travelled across the world and gained an international reputation for his woodblock prints of American and European landscapes. New research will provide an insight into Hiroshi’s time in London, including his visit to Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1900, and his signature in the Gallery’s visitor book, along with his diaries, will serve as an intimate starting point for the show. The exhibition will include over 20 works by Hiroshi, many of which will be on display in the UK for the first time, with highlights including El Capitan (1925), A Canal in Venice (1925) and Kumoi Cherry Trees (1926).

Fujio Yoshida 

Yellow Iris, 1954 

Private Collection 

Photograph by Mareo Suemasa.

Fujio Yoshida  (1887–1987)

Works by Yoshida Fujio, a renowned watercolourist, painter and printmaker, will be exhibited in the UK for the first time. Fujio was married to Hiroshi and travelled with him across the USA and Europe, exhibiting her delicate watercolours of Japan to acclaim. Upon returning home in 1907, she took part in the first exhibition organised by the Japanese Academy of Arts. A skilled printmaker, Fujio later became known for her iconic close-up designs of plants and flowers.

Toshi Yoshida 

Unknown (Michi no), 1968 

Private Collection 

Photograph by Mareo Suemasa

Tōshi Yoshida (1911–1995) and Hodaka Yoshida  (1926–1995) 

The exhibition also showcases prints by Hiroshi’s and Fujio’s sons, Tōshi and Hodaka, both of whom brought post-war abstraction to the Japanese printmaking process.

Early on in his career, Yoshida Tōshi followed in his father’s footsteps, depicting landscapes and cityscapes, but experimented with abstract prints after World War II. The exhibition includes some of his most accomplished works, including Night Tokyo: Supper Waggon (1938) and Camouflage (1985).

Hodaka Yoshida  

Profile of an Ancient Warrior, 1958 

Courtesy Fukuoka Art Museum 

Yoshida Hodaka was a leading printmaker in post-war Japan. In a break from his family’s established style, he expanded upon traditional printmaking and incorporated collage and photoetching into his practice. Like his father and brother, foreign travels influenced his choice of motifs, but he was also inspired by Pop Art, Surrealism and Abstraction. Works such as Profile of an Ancient Warrior (1958) and Nonsense Mythology (1969) demonstrate his unique style.

Chizuko Yoshida 

Tenryuji Garden, 1953 

Private Collection

Photograph by Mareo Suemasa.

Chizuko Yoshida (1924–2017)

Yoshida Chizuko, who married Hodaka, was a renowned artist and co-founder of the first group of female printmakers in Japan, the Women’s Print Association. Chizuko often depicted landscapes, nature, and traditional Japanese scenes but she also explored aspects of abstraction and repetition. Her works were said to have connected popular art movements such as Abstract Expressionism and traditional Japanese printmaking. Highlights include A View at the Western Suburb of the Metropolis/ Rainy Season (1995) and Jazz (1954).

Ayomi Yoshida (b. 1958)

The exhibition culminates with a new site-specific installation of cherry blossom by Yoshida Ayomi, Hodaka’s and Chizuko’s daughter. The youngest member of the Yoshida printmaking family, Ayomi’s practice combines traditional Japanese printmaking techniques with modern elements, often utilising organic materials, and she has been exhibited at major international institutions. Ayomi’s immersive installation, a new work created especially for Dulwich Picture Gallery, explores the recurring theme of seasonality in Japanese art and is inspired by the Cherry trees in Dulwich Village, originally taken from the iconic site of Yoshino in Japan, famous for its cherry blossom.

Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking feature loans from international and private collections. The majority of works by Yoshida Hiroshi will be on loan from the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan and are travelling to the UK for the first time. The exhibition is curated by Dr Monika Hinkel with support from Helen Hillyard, Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery. It will be accompanied by a full colour publication featuring new research by Dr Monika Hinkel.

Jennifer Scott, Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery, said:

“I get goosebumps thinking about Yoshida Hiroshi’s visit to Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1900. We (metaphorically) welcome him back with this landmark exhibition which introduces UK audiences to his exquisite work and to his legacy - an exceptional family of printmakers.”

Dr Monika Hinkel, Curator of the exhibition, said:

“It is exciting to be able to exhibit so many iconic works of the renowned Yoshida family of printmakers to showcase the fascinating creative development of such outstanding artists over three generations.”

Ayomi Yoshida  said:

“When I found my grandfather’s signature in the Dulwich Picture Gallery guest book, my heart skipped a beat. What an exciting and intriguing journey it must have been for Hiroshi, then an unknown painter and only 23, traveling from a country so far away. How proud he would be of this family exhibit of six, welcomed 120 years later at this wonderful museum.”

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY 

Gallery Road, London SE21 7AD 

www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

Helen Frankenthaler @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London - Radical Beauty

Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Through 18 April 2022

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents the first major UK exhibition of woodcuts by the leading Abstract Expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011). Shining a light on the artist’s groundbreaking woodcuts it showcases works never shown before in the UK, to reveal Helen Frankenthaler as a creative force and a trailblazer of printmaking, who endlessly pushed the possibilities of the medium.

Ranging from Helen Frankenthaler’s first ever woodcut in 1973, to her last work published in 2009, this major print retrospective brings together 30 works on loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, including Madame Butterfly (2000) and East and Beyond (1973) to reveal the enormous diversity in scale and technique in her oeuvre. Challenging traditional notions of woodcut printmaking, the exhibition reveals the charge and energy behind Helen Frankenthaler’s ‘no rules’ approach, arranged thematically to spotlight the elements crucial to her unique style of mark-marking, from experimentation to inspiration and collaboration.

At the age of only 23 Helen Frankenthaler created her influential oil painting Mountains and Sea (1952), the first work produced using her signature soak stain technique - pouring thinned paint directly onto canvas from above to create broad expanses of translucent color. It was a breakthrough that would propel Frankenthaler into the spotlight of the New York art scene at a time where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning dominated. This technique went on to influence the artists of the Color Field school of painting, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and had a profound impact on her printmaking career.

Opening ten years after her death, ‘Radical Beauty’ examines Helen Frankenthaler’s revolutionary approach to the woodcut, positioning her as one of the medium’s great innovators. In the same way as she did with her earlier paintings, Helen Frankenthaler defied the limitations of what is often considered the most rudimentary of printmaking techniques; she found new dimensions to the medium, experimenting with different orientations and colourways, and a variety of new tools and methods. What resulted is an incomparable body of work, where prints appear painterly and spontaneous with expanses of colour and fluid forms.

Highlights include Helen Frankenthaler’s first woodcut East and Beyond (1973) created by printing onto multiple blocks to avoid negative space. The work holds a sense of tangible colour and form, but at the same time has a fluidity that sets it apart from other artists at the time such as Jasper Johns. Other standout works include Cameo (1980) and Freefall (1993), which further demonstrate how Helen Frankenthaler accepted the challenge of woodcut printmaking and found ways to make it yield to her approach. In Cameo, Helen Frankenthaler introduced a new layered approach to colour and used her distinctive “guzzying” technique – where she worked her surfaces with sandpaper and in some instances, dentist drills, to achieve different affects.

A key focus of the exhibition is Helen Frankenthaler’s masterpiece, Madame Butterfly (2000). Sharing its title with the 1904 opera by Giacomo Puccini, the triptych’s light pastel colours and stained marks show Frankenthaler at her most expressive and lyrical. Created in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and Yasuyuki Shibata from 46 woodblocks and 102 colours, the work measures over two metres in length and occupies an entire room in the exhibition, along with a work proof and study to explore the complexity of its evocative title. In this print, and in others in the exhibition we can also understand Helen Frankenthaler’s working process and how each collaboration propelled her forward creatively. The exhibition includes all six woodcuts of the series Tales of Genji (1998), a highly ambitious body of work for which Helen Frankenthaler employed her soak-stain technique– this time painting with water-based colours onto sheets of plywood. Working with Tyler and his studio of printmakers once again, they embarked on a process of constant experimentation and a journey of trial and error to achieve Helen Frankenthaler’s vision.

Jane Findlay, Exhibition Curator and Head of Programme & Engagement at Dulwich Picture Gallery, said:

“This is a truly special opportunity for visitors to get up close to Frankenthaler’s phenomenal works – all of which have never been shown before in this country – in the intimate spaces of Dulwich Picture Gallery. There is something magical about how she breathes life into such a rigid medium, retaining the energy and dynamism - that born at once feeling - that you see in her painting. And with her proofs and process explored alongside we’ll show the painstaking work behind these beguiling works – revealing just how accomplished Frankenthaler was in modulating control and spontaneity in her art.”

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

Gallery Road, London SE21 7AD

www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

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Georg Baselitz @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Hands

Georg Baselitz: Hands

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

13 April - 15 May 2021

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents an exhibition of a major new body of work by German artist Georg Baselitz (b. 1938). 

Hands focuses on two new series of prints that explore the subject of the hand. Estranged from the body, the hands writhe and twist, emerging in a series of renderings that form part of Georg Baselitz’s ongoing survey of the human form, which has been at the forefront of his practice since the 1960s.

The first series, entitled Eine Hand ist keine Faust, 2019 – translated as A Hand is not a Fist – consists of 12 etchings, each depicting Baselitz’s hand clenching, pointing, grabbing and twisting. Gallery director David Cleaton-Roberts comments; “Each one is a delicate depiction of the artist’s own hand, drawn onto the copper plate in a variety of positions and each printed in one of three colours. The second project is comprised of two complementary suites of ten aquatints titled Mano – one group printed in gold and the other in white, depicting an abstracted representation of a hand, printed onto dense, dark backgrounds. The two suites show distinct and contrasting renderings of a hand, both haunting and powerful.”

The second suite of prints Mano (gold) and Mano (white), 2019, consisting of ten aquatints each, hover closer to abstraction as the hands, now more fragile and open, emerge from a dark background, appearing to loosen their grip. Hands showcases a pictorial device for which Georg Baselitz has long been recognised, with all his images appearing upside down. For the past fifty years he has subverted traditional representations of the human form by upending his figure and its component parts. This inversion acts partially as a vehicle for Georg Baselitz to remove focus from the narrative content so that he can explore the mark making itself.

Georg Baselitz is a prolific printmaker and printmaking is as essential a part of his artistic practice as painting, drawing and sculpture. He uses a variety of intaglio techniques to realise these new works; having initially drawn and proofed the plates on his own etching press at his studio on the Ammersee, outside Munich, he then works with a master printer who pulls the final editions. Hands forms part of a wider project which includes paintings, sculptures and drawings, all on the same subject, which Baselitz began in 2019.

This is be the artist’s second solo exhibition (after Georg Baselitz: Devotion in 2019) at the Cristea Roberts Gallery, which represents the artist for his original prints. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a text by David Cleaton-Roberts and an essay by psychoanalyst and author, Darian Leader.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

cristearoberts.com

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Andy Warhol @ Portland Art Museum: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation
Portland Art Museum
October 8, 2016 - January 1, 2017

The Portland Art Museum presents Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation. This major retrospective exhibition of approximately 250 Andy Warhol prints and ephemera from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer is the largest of its kind ever to be presented. It spans two floors of the Museum and includes instantly recognizable images such as Andy Warhol's iconic Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) and Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn).

Printmaking was a vital artistic practice for Andy Warhol. Prints figure prominently throughout his career from his earliest work as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, to the collaborative silkscreens made in the Factory during the '60s and the commissioned portfolios of his final years. Portland collector Jordan D. Schnitzer's comprehensive collection establishes the range of Warhol's innovative graphic production as it evolved over the course of four decades. The artist's well-known fascination with popular culture also instills the exhibition with a chronicle of American life in the second half of the twentieth century. The two threads corne together to reveal how Warhol's print publishing enterprise underscores the évolution of today's hyper sophisticated, saturated, and sawy visual culture.

The exhibition is organized chronologically and by series. The structure demonstrates in depth Andy Warhol's use of different printmaking techniques, beginning with illustrated books and ending with the screenprinted editions. The exhibition also highlights links between Andy Warhol's obsession with serial image repetition and the essence of printmaking as a rnechanical means for reproducing images. With this convergence, Andy Warhol famously complicated distinctions between the original and the reproduction. The results muddied the conventional approach of highly valuing unique works that display the artist's touch, instead celebrating print multiples as a medium for experimentation.

"Andy Warhol harnessed the allure of media images of celebrity, consumer goods, sex, death, and disaster to create his iconic pop art," said exhibition curator Sara Krajewski, the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modem and Contemporary Art.

"This retrospective provides an in-depth look at how the artist manipulated the seductive power of the photography and the televisual in his printmaking. Thirty-five years of prints offer a compelling view of Warhol's critical use of new imaging formats and technologies, from newsprint distribution to instant cameras, television and video. Our comprehensive survey of Warhol's vast print production demonstrates Warhol's impact on the évolution of contemporary visual culture."

Andy Warhol's prints present a journey through the reproduced image in American popular culture: from icons Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe to the socially charged Birmingham civil rights protests and political posters of the 1970s. In its entirety, the exhibition offers a bellwether of contemporary life and society's ongoing obsession with celebrities, fashion, political figures, athletes, sensationalism, and scandal.

"The Portland Art Museurn's ambitious overview of Andy Warhol's prints offers an opportunity to see the artist anew," observes Richard H. Axsom, contributing essayist to the exhibition catalogue. "Playing upon and manipulating the irnagery of popular culture, Warhol fashioned in his major print series a body of work of immeasurable power. Under-appreciated is its profound humanity, often obscured by the glamor and glitz of Warhol's public persona. For an artist known for his superficiality, Warhol was among the least superficiel artists of his time."

Andy Warhol: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation is accompanied by an exhibition catalog published in partnership with the Foundation. A number of public and school programs will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition, including lectures by exhibition curator Krajewski and Blake Gopnik, art critic and Warhol scholar; Jordan Schnitzer in conversation with Richard H. Axsom, senior curator at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; and a variety of workshops, artist demonstrations, school tours, and community activities. For more information and updates, visit portlandartmuseum.org.

Organized by the Portland Art Museum and curated by Sara Krajewski, The Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modem and Contemporary Art.

PORTLAND ART MUSEUM
1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97205
www.portlandartmuseum.org

Chuck Close, Miami Art Museum - Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration

Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration
Miami Art Museum
May 14 – August 22, 2004

Miami Art Museum presents Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration. Long celebrated as one of America’s foremost painter CHUCK CLOSE is also a master of the artistic language of printmaking. Direct from its presentation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this exhibition chronicles the genius of Chuck Close in the medium in which he has done some of his most exciting work. In Miami, the exhibition has been coordinated by MAM Assistant Director for Programs and Senior Curator, Peter Boswell. Included in MAM’s presentation is a new woodcut self-portrait that has never been exhibited before.

In Chuck Close’s work the human face becomes a series of gridded abstractions that create a whole image when assembled in the eye of the viewer. Curated by Terrie Sultan, director of Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, Chuck Close Prints features 118 works dating from 1972 to 2002, illustrating the artist’s range of invention in etching, aquatint, lithography, handmade paper, direct gravure, silkscreen, traditional Japanese woodcut, and reduction linocut.

Chuck Close has said that his experiments in printmaking have been enormously influential on his paintings. “Prints have moved me in my unique work more than anything else has. Prints change the way I think about things.”

In the course of his career, Chuck Close has overcome a series of difficulties; his father died when he was still a boy, his mother became seriously ill and the artist himself was dyslexic – a condition which for lack of an accurate diagnosis, led him to be labeled “slow” in school. Nonetheless, Chuck Close graduated magna cum laude from the University of Washington and earned an MFA with highest honors from Yale University.

In 1988, at the age of 49, Chuck Close was at the height of his career as a painter, when he was stricken with a spinal blood clot that left him a partial quadriplegic. The art world was stunned. Chuck Close was forced to come to grips with living the rest of his life in a motorized wheelchair with only limited use of his hands and legs. Chuck Close not only found a way to return to painting, he also developed new techniques that catapulted him to an even more prominent place among artists worldwide.

This exhibition puts the spotlight on the decidedly interactive approach Chuck Close takes with his prints. While the production of a painting can occupy Chuck Close for many months, it is not unusual for one print to take more than two years from conception to final edition. The relationship between Chuck Close and the master printers has become key to the creation of his work. Chuck Close Prints constitutes a remarkable self-portrait of the creative drive, vision and intellect of one of America’s most important living artists.

”Chuck Close has triumphed over immense difficulties to carve out a singular place for himself among artists,” said MAM Director Suzanne Delehanty. “This is a monumental exhibition and we’re pleased to present it in South Florida as part of our commitment to bringing the very best in art to our community.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated 160-page catalogue published by Princeton University Press. 

About the Curator Peter Boswell

Peter Boswell has been assistant director for programs and senior curator at MAM since 1999. He is responsible for the growth of MAM’s permanent collection as well as the museum’s exhibitions, educational programs and publications. Mr. Boswell holds a BA in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Art History from Stanford University. At MAM, Peter Boswell led the curatorial effort behind the exhibition Miami Currents: Linking Community and Collection (2002) and has organized exhibitions for the museum’s New Work series of the work of Donald Lipski (2002); Teresita Fernández (2002); and Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt (2003).

MIAMI ART MUSEUM
101 West Flagler Street, Miami, FL 33130
www.miamiartmuseum.org

Updated 14.07.2020

Rembrandt at The British Museum, London

Rembrandt The Printmaker
The British Museum, London
25 January - 8 April 2001

Rembrandt was the most original printmaker of all time. In no less than 300 etchings he covered the full range of styles and subjects for which he is celebrated as a painter and draughtsman, including self-portraits, scenes from the Bible, vignettes of everyday life and character studies. The well-known Hundred Guilder Print, the Three Trees and the Three Crosses are among his most extraordinary creations. Famously experimental, he often reworked and scratched at his copper plates to improve and extend their expressive power. The results can look startlingly modern and continue to inspire artists today. 

Rembrandt's prints have been avidly collected since the day they were made and over the past two centuries the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam have built up the greatest of all collections of these famous rarities. This major loan exhibition, the most ambitious display of Rembrandt's prints ever mounted, will present for the first time the highlights of both collections to provide a fully representative panorama of Rembrandt's achievements as a printmaker, from their beginnings in the second half of the 1620s until his death forty years later. Organised jointly with the Rijksmuseum and curated by leading authorities in current Rembrandt scholarship, the exhibition will show almost 200 impressions of these masterpieces of western art.

The exhibition is also the first to present the results of important new areas of research that have opened up in recent years, allowing us not only to follow the progress of Rembrandt's work on each etching, but also to determine when he revised the images. Many of his etchings can now be dated more exactly, and individual states of his prints are now precisely datable for the first time. The role played by Rembrandt's preparatory drawings and related oil-sketches, several of which are included from collections in Europe and America, is also now better understood. Providing an intimate glimpse into Rembrandt's working methods and a new understanding of his conception of his print oeuvre, these fresh insights will be presented to a wider public for the first time. 

A richly illustrated catalogue, Rembrandt the Printmaker, will accompany the exhibition, with 90 colour and 420 black-and-white illustrations (384pp.), by Erik Hinterding (University of Utrecht), Ger Luijten (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) and Martin Royalton-Kisch (British Museum), with contributions by Marijn Schapelhouman, Peter Schatborn (both Rijksmuseum) and Ernst van de Wetering (Head of the Rembrandt Research Project, Amsterdam). Exhibition Price £45 (hardback).

THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Prints and Drawings Gallery
Museum's Website: www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

Anne Desmet, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester - Towers and Transformations. A Retrospective Exhibition

Anne Desmet: Towers and Transformations
A Retrospective Exhibition
The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester
1 October - 28 November 1999

Anne Desmet is one of the most original talents in contemporary printmaking. Her wood engravings and collages show a unique imagination as well as an abundance of technical skill.

Central to her work is a vision of architecture, often depicted in minute detail. Anne Desmet attributes this partially to prolonged stays in hospital as a child when the artist passed the time making detailed pencil drawings of her surroundings. A year spent in Italy inspired the many prints featuring Roman and Italian buildings. The multi-layered aspect of Italian cities is shown with ancient ruins co-existing with the modern. Anne Desmet explores the themes of change, decay, and regeneration, with some of her subjects undergoing amazing transformations in a series of related images, like looking at a flickbook or a series of film stills.

Anne Desmet was born in Liverpool in 1964, and was a student at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford from 1983-86. Subsequently she studied at the Central School of Art and Design in London and held a scholarship at the British School in Rome.

The exhibition is touring the UK and was organised by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and supported by the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and Southern Arts. An illustrated catalogue is available at Zwemmers, the Gallery Shop.

THE WHITWORTH ART GALLERY
The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6ER
www.whitworth.man.ac.uk