Catherine Goodman @ Hauser & Wirth, NYC - 'Island' Exhibition

Catherine Goodman. Island 

Hauser & Wirth, New York

13 November – 20 December 2025 

Catherine Goodman

The ULAE Series, 2024

Monotype on Somerset paper

64.8 x 73.7 cm / 25 1/2 x 29 in

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Catherine Goodman at the ULAE Studio, November 2024

Photo: Jin Young Kim

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth presents its first exhibition dedicated to the prints of noted British artist Catherine Goodman. This body of monotypes named ‘The ULAE Series’ emerged from Goodman’s 2024 residency at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island, marking both her first major exploration of printmaking and an expansion of her aesthetic vocabulary. ‘Much of the new language that was evolving in the prints followed me home to the studio in London and was translated into paint,’ she wrote in reflection of the experience—a cross-pollination made visible in a new painting developed from this period, also on view in this exhibition.

Catherine Goodman joins a distinguished lineage of modern and contemporary artists who have expanded their practices through printmaking at ULAE. Among them, Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler stand out in particular as kindred spirits—artists who, like Goodman, were devoted passionately to daily drawing and guided by instinct. At ULAE, Catherine Goodman immersed herself in the unpredictable process of painting on and printing from copper plates. Working intuitively, she built up highly expressive, densely layered compositions, often laying down a black or grey calligraphic mark as starting point. Catherine Goodman sometimes carried works in progress home in the evening to adjust with an oil stick, forging an unorthodox dialogue between mediums. 

‘Almost everyone I knew in the world was asleep because of the time difference to London, so I spent the evenings alone, drawing into the prints that hadn’t worked out for me that day. It was an extraordinarily intense time navigating my inner landscape, having an opportunity to review my life back home. It seems a time of innocence now.’ — Catherine Goodman

Catherine Goodman

The ULAE Series, 2024

Monotype on En Tout Cas paper

64.8 x 73.7 cm / 25 1/2 x 29 in

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Catherine Goodman

The ULAE Series, 2024

Monotype on En Tout Cas paper

81.3 x 91.4 cm / 32 x 36 in

Photo: Thomas Barratt

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Catherine Goodman has long centered her practice on portraiture. Religious icons from her childhood left an early mark, and she often mentions seeing portraits even within her abstractions. This oscillation between figuration and abstraction—a constant in ‘The ULAE Series’—relies in part on the artist’s longstanding daily drawing practice, which she cites as the initial means of harnessing her sources of inspiration, which range from natural phenomena to film. One work on view in the exhibition depicts the titular boy from Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie ‘Ivan’s Childhood,’ gazing through a telescope, a dramatic yet intimate image. 

Each work, Catherine Goodman writes, whether figurative or abstract, is ‘layered with those memories of my time there, the light, urgency and sense of isolation—being cut off from the mainland of our lives while exploring the inner landscape.’ 

Artist Catherine Goodman

Born in London in 1961, Catherine Goodman CBE lives and works in London. Goodman studied at Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts, London, and the Royal Academy Schools, London, where she won the Royal Academy Gold Medal in 1987. Goodman’s lifelong commitment to social justice through education forms a critical aspect of her artistic identity and approach to making. In 2000, Goodman established The Royal Drawing School with HM King Charles III to deliver subsidized and free education to thousands of young and disadvantaged people in the UK. Today, she continues in her role as Founding Artistic Director and Academic Board Member. For many years, Catherine Goodman organized drawing classes for individuals dealing with homelessness and disabilities, and she continues to offer refuge classes to young people with mental health issues on a weekly basis. She is also the primary caregiver of her sister, Sophie, who was born with multiple health conditions and has always been a subject of Goodman’s practice. In 2014, Goodman was awarded Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (LVO) for services to The Royal Drawing School, and Commander of the Order of British Empire (CBE) in 2024 for her services to art in the UK. Goodman has served as the Artist Trustee at The National Gallery, London since 2019. Her paintings are held in significant private and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, The Rothschild Foundation, and the Royal Collection Trust.

HAUSER & WIRTH

443 West 18th Street, New York City

www.hauserwirth.com

Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting @ Philadelphia Art Museum

Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting

Philadelphia Art Museum 

Through November 16, 2025 

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984)

Untitled (Who is Queen), 2020 

Enamel screenprint and graphite pigment 

Sheet: 64 × 49 inches (162.6 × 124.5 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 105-2024-19 

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984)

Untitled (Figure and Malcolm X), 2020

Enamel screenprint and graphite pigment 

Sheet: 64 × 49 inches (162.6 × 124.5 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 105-2024-20

Chuck Close 

Self Portrait, 2017 

Screenprint in ninety-one colors 

Sheet: 69 × 57  3/4 inches (175.3 × 146.7 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x21994(10)

The Philadelphia Art Museum presents Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting, the first exhibition to spotlight four decades of collaborations between the Brand X printmaking workshop and a diverse roster of contemporary artists. On view through November 16, 2025, the exhibition features more than 80 screenprints by Helen Frankenthaler, Rashid Johnson, Alex Katz, Tschabalala Self, and Mickalene Thomas, among many others.

The exhibition celebrates the transformative gift of the Brand X Editions Archive to the Philadelphia Art Museum, presenting a selection from the over 400 screenprints given by master printer and founder Robert Blanton. Since establishing the workshop in 1979, Blanton and his team of skilled printers, chromists, and specialists have worked in collaboration with an impressive list of artists to push screenprinting techniques to meet the artists’ varied styles and expressive ambitions. The body of work from Brooklyn-based Brand X builds significantly on the museum’s extensive holdings of historical screenprints, adding major contemporary examples of traditional and experimental techniques. The Philadelphia Art Museum now holds one of the most comprehensive collections of screenprints along with essential archives related to the medium’s history and evolution from commercial tool to vibrant fine-art technique.

Emmanuel Taku

Entanglement, 2022 

Screenprint, printed in twenty-three colors 

with  collage elements 

Sheet: 60 × 40 1/4 inches  (152.4 × 102.2 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, 2023- 191-32

Emmanuel Taku

Got You, 2022 

Screenprint, printed in twenty-seven colors 

with  collage elements 

Sheet: 60 × 40 1/4 inches  (152.4 × 102.2 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, 2023- 191-33

“It is an honor to be the chosen home for Brand X’s magnificent collection of prints, said Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Art Museum. “As expert printmakers, internationally renowned for their craft, Brand X are the true leaders in this field. For a museum like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with such a rich and dedicated history in printmaking, it is a privilege for us to have this opportunity to welcome our visitors to experience and enjoy this generous gift.”

Deborah Kass

OY/YO, 2011 

Two screenprints, printed in three colors on  paper board 

Framed: 21 1/2 × 20 inches (54.6 × 50.8 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x22034a,b

Deborah Kass (b. 1952)

Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner, 2022 

Silkscreen, printed in seven colors on Coventry Rag paper 

Sheet: 57 × 57 inches (144.8 × 144.8 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-4

On view throughout the galleries are the results of Brand X’s dynamic collaborations across four decades of work. Together, the prints reveal the remarkable versatility of screenprinting. In the first gallery, for instance, works by Rashid Johnson, Deborah Kass, Adam Pendleton, and Mickalene Thomas demonstrate the medium’s ability to mimic the richness of paint layers, render a photographic precision, and produce variegated textures and surfaces. These artists expand the technical boundaries of screenprint in their exploration of themes relating to belonging, memory, and self-definition. From the dense, painterly urgency of Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Anxious Red to the layered intricacy of Mickalene Thomas’s November 1977, each work here shows how, at the Brand X workshop, screenprinting can be stretched, challenged, and transformed in response to an artist’s creative impulses.

Troy Michie 

Doubling, 2019 

Screenprint, Framed: 40 × 30 inches (101.6 × 76.2 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x22005(6)

Emily Mae Smith 

Poetry (Toy in Blood), 2022 

Screenprint, printed in forty-seven colors 

Sheet:  60 × 45 1/2 inches (152.4 × 115.6 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2024, 105- 2024-30(11)

The exhibition also addresses themes relating to text and language, pattern and decoration, graphic illusion, and landscape and figuration. Eight progressive proofs of Vija Celmins’s Ocean Surface offer a rare view onto the screenprinting process. From print to print, visitors can see how the image was formed cumulatively—by the sequential printing of individual screens, each bearing a single layer of ink. In final form, Celmins’s image materializes through sixteen applications of nuanced grays—an additive and subtle process apt for rendering the depth and detail of the ocean. Throughout the exhibition, equal emphasis is given to the pictorial and the material. Brand X Editions shines light on the technical procedures and the many roles—beyond that of the artist—that are vital to the production of screenprints.

“Just like the work that happens at Brand X, this exhibition and its catalogue were thoroughly collaborative endeavors, said Louis Marchesano, curator of the exhibition and the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Conservation. “The addition of the Brand X Editions Archive, which will continue to grow as the studio produces more editions, goes a long way toward building an authoritative resource on screenprinting at the museum.”

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990)

Homebodies – All American 1, 2022

Monoprint, fabric collage, pigment wash, 

hand coloring, and enamel silkscreen 

Sheet (each): 24 × 18 inches (61 × 45.7 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-29a,b

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990)

Homebodies – All American 1, 2022

Monoprint, fabric collage, pigment wash, 

hand coloring, and enamel silkscreen 

Sheet (each): 24 × 18 inches (61 × 45.7 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-29a,b

Rashid Johnson 

Seascape, 2023 

Screenprint, printed in nine colors, with hand, 

applied navy acrylic mixture 

Gift of Brand X  Editions, New York, 2023, 105-2024-9

Rashid Johnson 

Untitled Large Mosaic, 2025

Screenprint, framed: 61 X 105 inches (1 154.9x 266.7 cm)

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x 22005(5)

Extending the exhibition beyond the gallery space, Rashid Johnson’s Untitled (Large Mosaic), 2025, is displayed in the museum’s Forum Balcony. For over three years, Rashid Johnson and his collaborators at Brand X developed this spectacular 293-color print, combining traditional screenprinting techniques—visible in the flat passages of bold color—with unconventional materials, including wood veneer, mirrored mylar, and cast paper oyster shells. Inspired by Johnson’s low-relief wall mosaics composed of innumerable tile fragments and other bits of material, this project captures Brand X’s enduring commitment to pursuing new levels of technical innovation and experimentation.

Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Philadelphia Art Museum curators and paper conservators, an interview with Robert Blanton and David DeSanctis of Brand X, a technical glossary related to the history and technique of screenprint, and an inventory of the archive held by Philadelphia Art Museum.

The exhibition is curated by Louis Marchesano, the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director of Cultural Affairs and Conservation, with Em Dombrovskaya, the Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow; Laurel Garber, the Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings; and Emily Friedman, the Allen and Kelli Questrom Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Dallas Museum of Art.

A series of exhibitions by Brand X collaborators including Rashid Johnson and Joel Mesler will be shown at the Philadelphia Art Museum through 2028.

PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM 

Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

www.visitpham.org

Brice Marden @ Gagosian Gallery, London - 'Etched Letters' Exhibition Curated by the Estate of Brice Marden

Brice Marden

Etched Letters

Gagosian Gallery, London

October 10 – November 29, 2025

Gagosian presents Etched Letters, an exhibition of editioned prints, unpublished proofs, and related drawings produced by Brice Marden between 2007 and 2012. Curated by the Estate of Brice Marden, this is the first gallery display of Marden’s prints in London, and reflects the artist’s dedication to printmaking, which began in the 1960s and continued throughout his career.

While his 2006–07 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was traveling, Brice Marden embarked on an international trip of his own. At the National Palace Museum in Taipei, he encountered “Seven-character Poem (Besotted by Flower Vapors)” (1087), a Song dynasty verse by Huang T’ing-chien (1045–1105). This example of Chinese calligraphy, which was mounted to an album page with blank borders on both vertical edges, inspired Brice Marden to make the first drawings in what became the Letter paintings and works on paper.

Beginning in 2007, Brice Marden worked with master printmaker Jennifer Melby to produce a set of etchings derived from the Letters of Gratitude drawings—works that had been made as tokens of appreciation for help received during the lead up to the MoMA retrospective. While the sheets were still in development, they were photographed, and printmaker Lothar Osterburg translated these images onto copper plates using photogravure, a process that replicated Marden’s original marks with a new tonal and textural character.

Brice Marden then elaborated on the plates with his own hand-rendered aquatint additions, with Melby running off test proofs as they moved through different states. Three plates were completed to full editions: #1, which was printed in 2011 as First Etched Letter; #3 (2007–12), which was derived from Letter of Gratitude #1; and #8 (2007–12), which began life as Letter of Gratitude #17.

In the prints, as well as the drawings from which they were developed, each page is filled with letter-like marks that suggest a formal visual language as a guide to Marden’s compositional and psychological space. The artist’s use of ink-dipped sticks as drawing instruments lends the work an unpredictability and, along with its calligraphic influence, it is embedded with a clear interest in classical geometry.

With the Estate of Brice Marden, Gagosian is developing a book to update the catalogue published by Tate in 1991. The new volume includes prints made from that date onward and features an essay by Jeremy Lewison, curator of the Tate exhibition.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY LONDON

28–29 Burlington Arcade, London W1J OQJ

gagosian.com

The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - "The Sum of the Parts. The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers" Exhibition

The Sum of the Parts

The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

Until 29 August 2025

Josef Albers 

Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers, 1962 

The complete portfolio of 10 screenprints 

Paper and Image each: 43 x 43 cm (each) 

Edition of 250 

Photo courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents the first exhibition dedicated to all of the print portfolios made by Josef Albers.

The Sum of the Parts: The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers, features eighteen portfolios using lithography, silkscreen, inkless intaglio and embossing. The portfolios made over a period of 14 years which are increasingly rare to see in their complete form, is each a powerful demonstration of how markedly original Albers was in his understanding of colour and line.

Josef Albers (1888 - 1976), was one of the greatest abstract artists of the twentieth century, creating seminal works in painting, stained glass, and furniture.  He was also a dedicated printmaker who produced work in a variety of print techniques right up until his death in 1976. His complete graphic oeuvre comprises some 350 editions. In printmaking, Josef Albers found the perfect vehicle with which to realize the full array of his imagery and to develop his theoretical approach to colour.

Josef Albers made his first suite in 1962, Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers. It was the first time he explored his Homage to the Square painted imagery in a series of prints. Using an array of solid, unmodulated colours, the viewer is invited to perceive shifting depth and change of tone in multiple works at once.

Josef Albers went on to produce more sets, which each take a particular compositional theme, which is then explored through variations of tone, colour and line. Midnight and Noon, 1964, brings together two opposing colour sets, printed in different densities, in a single portfolio. In Soft Edge-Hard Edge, 1965, edges define forms but then begin to disappear before your eyes, creating a conflict between what is precise and what is an illusion. White Line Squares, 1966, features colours registered side by side, delineated by a single white line. The addition of this precise line creates the appearance of four colours, although only three inks are used. 

In the early 1970s Josef Albers spent almost two years making Formulation: Articulation, 1972, a set of two boxed portfolios each containing 66 sheets of paper screenprinted with imagery from every decade of his career, from the Bauhaus period to early woodcuts, pre-Columbian influences and his Homage to the Square explorations. 

A realisation of the essential ideas in Albers’ works, Formulation: Articulation demonstrates the visual and material connections that drove the artist’s practice over the preceding forty years.

Arguably two of Josef Albers most important works in any medium, are the portfolios Gray Instrumentation I and II, made in 1974-75. Together they are the ultimate expression of Albers theoretical approach to colour. The basis for each work is the interactions between different shades of grey. This exploration by Josef Albers was prompted by seeing black and white photos of his Homage to the Square paintings.

In previous portfolios colours were typically printed on top of one another. However, the inks used in Gray Instrumentation I and II, were applied adjacently without overlapping, a level of precision that had not been seen in screenprinting before and a process more closely aligned with Josef Albers painting. Nick Fox Weber, Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, states “As a totality, the twenty-four prints that comprise these two portfolios are in many ways Albers’s ultimate masterpiece.”

Still driven by his need and desire to discover colour relationships beyond anything in his previous work, Josef Albers made Never Before in 1976, which developed upon ideas he had started exploring over twenty-five years earlier in painting. The portfolio was completed, but Josef Albers was too unwell to complete signing each work. As a result a number of prints remain unsigned.

David Cleaton-Roberts, Gallery Director explains, “At the time of his death, he had just completed the series aptly titled Never Before. While artists creating works in series is not unique to printmaking, the ability to formulate, develop, and present an idea through multiple images, tied together by an underlying ethos and/or medium was perfectly realised by Albers using techniques that simultaneously allowed for multiplicity, repetition, and variation.”

The individual plates that make up each portfolio in this exhibition challenge or echo one another, support or oppose one another, but when viewed together, the visual perception and interpretation achieved demonstrates that the whole is always much greater than the sum of its parts.

The Sum of the Parts: The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers is accompanied by a 144-page fully illustrated hard-back publication. Featuring texts by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and David Cleaton-Roberts, a senior director of Cristea Roberts Gallery.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG 

cristearoberts.com

The Sum of the Parts. The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 12 June - 29 August 2025

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

Hauser & Wirth @ LOPF 2025 - London Original Print Fair - New releases, modern and contemporary highlights - Artists + Artworks

Hauser & Wirth @ Booth S9

London Original Print Fair 2025

20 — 23 March 2025

Thomas J Price 

Rood Boy (Untitled 2), 2024

Aluminum, 24ct gold leaf, walnut, acrylic

Ed. of 10 + 2 AP

70 x 50 x 9.5 cm / 27 1/2 x 19 5/8 x 3 3/4 inches 

Plate: 65 x 45 x 0.5 cm / 25 5/8 x 17 3/4 x 1/4 in

Shelf: 9.5 x 50 x 6.8 cm / 3 3/4 x 19 5/8 x 2 5/8 in

© Thomas J Price

Courtesy the artist & Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Eva Herzog

Rashid Johnson 

Untitled (Surrender), 2023

9-color silkscreen resist with hand-applied pigment

Co-published by Hauser & Wirth and Brand X Editions

Ed. of 51 + 15 AP

121.9 x 165.1 cm / 48 x 65 in

© Rashid Johnson

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Nicole Eisenman

Bar, 2012

Nine-color lithograph

AP 2/2, Ed. of 25 + 2 AP

78.1 x 59.7 cm / 30 3/4 x 23 1/2 in

© Nicole Eisenman

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Jungle Press Editions

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Hauser & Wirth returns to London Original Print Fair for the 40th anniversary with an exceptional selection of works reflecting the gallery’s commitment to prints and editions. Featuring works by both contemporary and modern artists from the gallery’s roster, the booth highlights the importance of printmaking to the artists’ multifaceted practices and celebrates the collaborations between artists and master printers. The fair presentation complements the gallery’s ongoing work with printmaking, which is headquartered in a dedicated Editions space on 18th Street in New York. 

Hauser & Wirth @ LOPF 2025: New releases and contemporary highlights

US artist Rashid Johnson debuts ‘Untitled (Surrender)’ (2023), a large silk screenprint which has been newly released by Hauser & Wirth and Brand X Editions. Part of the artist’s Surrender series, the large print features ghostly white faces which trace the development of his renowned Anxious Men series. The presentation also brings to London for the first time a selection of Henry Taylor’s etchings, first shown at the gallery’s editions space in New York earlier this year, including the self-portrait ‘Fade to Black, I Did Not Pay the Electric Bill’ and still life ‘I Love Looking at You’ (2024). 

Henry Taylor

I Love Looking at You, 2024

Color sugarlift aquatint

Ed. of 35 + 12 AP

123.2 x 106.7 cm / 48 1/2 x 42 in

© Henry Taylor

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

William Kentridge

I Look In The Mirror, I Know What I Need, 2024

Lithograph on handmade Korean paper

Ed. of 26 + 4 AP + 4 PP + 1 Archives + 1 BNF 128 x 168 cm /

50 3/8 x 66 1/8 in

© William Kentridge

All Rights Reserved

Photo: Nicolas Brasseur

Other major highlights include William Kentridge’s lithograph on handmade Korean paper ‘I Look In The Mirror, I Know What I Need’ (2024), featuring iconic motifs from the artist’s practice, such as the coffee pot. London-based artist Thomas J Price also debuts ‘Rood Boy (Untitled 2)’ (2024), which revisits an earlier print made in 2019 using 24ct gold leaf of a fictional character whose unflinching gaze meets directly with the viewer’s. Also based in London, artist Sonia Boyce’s ‘She is Benevolent’ (2024) takes inspiration from her latest video work ‘Benevolence’, a project for Palazzo della Ragione in Italy which examines traditional Italian folksongs as a powerful form of social commentary. 

The booth also features recent prints by contemporary artists, including a delicate copperplate etching by London-based artist Anj Smith from 2022 titled ‘Misleading, Like Lace,’ a selection of hardground etchings from George Condo and ‘Bar,’ a nine-colour lithograph print by Nicole Eisenman from 2012 made with Jungle Press Editions. 

Hauser & Wirth @ LOPF 2025: Historical modern masterworks

Philip Guston

Rug, 1981

Lithograph

AP 4/11, Ed. of 50 + 11 AP

49.5 x 73.7 cm / 19 1/2 x 29 in

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Complementing the gallery’s contemporary offering, the booth highlights historic works by modern masters. Philip Guston’s ‘Rug’ (1980) depicts the groundbreaking figurative style which defines the artist’s late works and the recurring symbolic motif of shoes. The booth also includes a selection of prints by Takesada Matsutani from the 1960s – 1970s—during which time he worked at Atelier 17 in Paris, Stanley William Hayter’s printmaking studio. Additional 20th-century highlights include prints by Dieter Roth, Günther Förg and Eduardo Chillida. 

HAUSER & WIRTH

www.hauserwirth.com

Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking @ Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge

Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge

March 7 - July 27, 2025

EDVARD MUNCH

Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1894

Etching and drypoint

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 

The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.559 

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

EDVARD MUNCH

Two Human  Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1899 

Woodcut, printed in four colors of ink

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 

The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.602

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

EDVARD MUNCH

Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1906–8.

Oil on canvas 

Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, 

The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.551

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

The Harvard Art Museums present an exhibition of works by Edvard Munch that examines the artist’s innovative techniques and the recurring themes across his paintings, woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, and combination prints. Highlighting the collaborative partnership between curatorial and conservation experts at the museums, the exhibition reveals new and ongoing technical research into Munch’s practice and shares recent discoveries about his materials and highly experimental methods. 

The exhibition showcases 70 works, primarily from the Harvard Art Museums collections. Thanks to a transformative gift from Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus, the museums now house one of the largest and most significant collections of artwork by Munch in the United States—a collection that is also distinctive for its technical variety. Key loans from the Munch Museum in Oslo include two paintings and eight examples of the artist’s materials used for printmaking, seven of which have never before been on display in the United States. 

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is well known for his innovative experiments in painting and printmaking. He often rendered the same subject matter in both mediums—repeatedly over decades—to investigate their distinctive possibilities. His highly expressive work deals with psychological themes of isolation, separation, anxiety, illness, and death, but also attraction and love. Technically Speaking explores Munch’s fascination with materiality, uncovers new avenues for thinking about his work, and delves into his unconventional techniques and the various themes he returned to again and again over many years.

“This exhibition showcases an exciting selection of Munch’s paintings and prints from a career that spanned more than 60 years,” said Elizabeth M. Rudy. “We are thrilled to present his work through a lens that is perfect for a university museum—one that reinforces our teaching and research mission—by sharing the results of our recent investigations into his techniques and materials.”

The exhibition begins with several iterations of Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), depicting a man and a woman standing at a shoreline, side by side yet isolated from one another. First painted by Munch in 1892 (a work later destroyed in an accident at sea), the motif is repeated in an etching from 1894 that depicts the original painting and five subsequent woodcuts that Munch produced between 1899 and 1917. The prints reveal the various intriguing woodcut and etching techniques the artist utilized and also show how he manipulated his jigsaw woodblocks to print different parts of a single work in different colors. They are displayed in the exhibition with the original steel-faced copperplate and jigsaw woodblock that were used to produce the prints. Two paintings on display continue the motif: the artist’s 1906–8 version from the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection is based on his woodcuts, and a later (final) version from around 1935, on loan from the Munch Museum, reverts to the composition of the couple used by Munch in his 1892 painting.

“Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) remains one of Munch’s most well-known subjects, and we are extremely fortunate to be able to trace his engagement with it over a period of more than 40 years and through nine works in our collections, supplemented by the generous loan of his last painting of the motif and two related matrices from the Munch Museum,” said Lynette Roth. “Together, they demonstrate the close relationship between painting and printmaking in Munch’s practice, his dedication to certain motifs over time, and his embrace of chance effects.”

Several other groupings highlight additional recurring themes in Munch’s work and how he experimented with their representation. Three woodcuts from the Woman’s Head against the Shore series show how Munch selectively printed his jigsaw woodblocks, omitting one of the pieces (the water) in one of the impressions. Four prints from The Kiss series—an etching and three woodcuts—portray a couple embracing in front of different backgrounds. Prints from Melancholy I and Melancholy III, on display with a rare example of Melancholy II, which Munch printed himself with his small hand-crank press, are shown with five of the artist’s original carved woodblocks. Four variations of Vampire II demonstrate how Munch sometimes combined lithographs with hand coloring and used woodblocks to add color as well. Also on display are three versions of Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair, including one used by Munch as a poster advertising an exhibition of his work at Diorama Hall in Kristiania (now Oslo).

Over the last several months, the works in the exhibition from Harvard’s collections have undergone technical study, including pigment analysis, selective treatments such as cleaning and varnish removal, and most of the prints were rematted and reframed. The painting Two Human Beings (1906–8) was varnished at some point in its history, which is not consistent with Munch’s practice of leaving his canvases without a unified glossy surface; this varnish has been removed. Train Smoke (1910) needed paint stabilization and cleaning to remove atmospheric grime, and Winter in Kragerø (1915) had its varnish removed to reveal a more vibrant snowy scene. This work was carried out by staff from the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, including Ellen Davis, Associate Paintings Conservator; Abby Schleicher, Assistant Paper Conservator; and Kate Smith, Senior Conservator of Paintings and Head of the Paintings Lab, and their findings are presented in the exhibition. Additionally, all six paintings on display from Harvard’s collections were reframed with new, historically accurate frames.

“Munch’s deep experimentations in painting and printmaking meant that he was constantly reworking his canvases and layering many different types of print techniques, which can become complicated to describe,” said Peter Murphy. “As research was underway and our conservators and curatorial team were deciphering how he created many of his works, I set out to break down the technical terms we were using in a friendly, digestible way. We hope that visitors will find the glossary useful, not only in the exhibition, but as something that can be kept and referenced beyond the show.”

The exhibition is curated by Elizabeth M. Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, and Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum; with Peter Murphy, Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum. This is the first major presentation at Harvard to examine Munch’s techniques and materials through the lens of the Strauses’ collection in 30 years, following the 1983 exhibition and publication Edvard Munch: Master Printmaker (organized by Charles W. Haxthausen and written by Elizabeth Prelinger) and Norma S. Steinberg’s 1995 exhibition and catalogue Munch in Color.

HARVARD ART MUSEUMS

32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

harvardartmuseums.org