Renaissance Impressions, which includes 82 masterworks in varying techniques by artists as diverse as Albrecht Dürer and Hendrik Goltzius, explores the seminal role that prints played in shaping Renaissance visual culture throughout Europe. The exhibition offers a rich and comprehensive survey of the Golden Age of printmaking and reveals the vital impact of this new creative medium on art, education, and society. It was through the printed image that the myths and motifs of ancient Greece and Rome became widely known, and religious imagery was transmitted across geographical and cultural boundaries. Artistic innovation was also impelled by this new reproductive medium, which allowed the broad distribution of influential compositions by such towering figures as Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The exhibition features many of the era’s most extraordinary and influential prints, including examples in all graphic media from Europe’s major printmaking centers of Antwerp, Florence, Fontainebleau, Haarlem, Mantua, Paris, Prague, and Rome.

Works from MAG’s rich collection of Renaissance decorative arts, including armor, stained glass, ceramics, and textiles, are interspersed throughout the loan exhibition of prints. These works highlight the surprising interconnections between this new print medium and how artists in other media transmitted, transformed, and translated print imagery. This appropriation of the print medium by other artists and craftspeople created a shared visual vocabulary that crossed artistic media and geographical boundaries.

Printmaking has been called the “contemporary art” of the Renaissance. Throughout the 16th century and beyond, print images proliferated and the market for both religious and secular imagery flourished. This developing market led to the new profession of print publishers, who offered collectors diverse subjects from ancient myths to traditional Christian motifs. Compelling imagery, imaginative design, and technical virtuosity were the qualities most prized by 16th-century collectors; professional print publishers straddled the line between art and business, commissioning works from the best artists of the time.

During the 1930s and 1940s, abstraction began to gain momentum as an exciting, fresh approach to modern artmaking in the United States, and a small contingent of American artists dedicated themselves to it. Labyrinth of Forms, a title inspired by an Alice Trumbull Mason work in the exhibition, alludes to the sense of discovery that drove these artists to establish a visual language reflecting the advances of the twentieth century.

A significant number of American abstractionists were women, and their efforts propelled the formal, technical, and conceptual evolution of abstract art in this country. A few, such as Lee Krasner and Louise Nevelson, have been duly recognized, but most remain overlooked despite their contributions. With over thirty works by twenty-seven artists drawn almost entirely from the Whitney’s collection, Labyrinth of Forms highlights both the achievements of these artists and the ways in which works on paper served as sites for important exploration and innovation.

While abstraction would prevail in the United States after World War II, in the preceding decades American abstractionists were vastly outnumbered by realist practitioners. Maligned by critics, and largely ignored by museums and galleries, these artists nevertheless saw themselves as aesthetic revolutionaries. In contrast to their European counterparts, who were often involved with movements defined by manifestos, they felt free to experiment, harnessing a broad range of styles to express the mood of the modern United States.

Buoyed by modernist art courses and new venues for viewing European avant-garde art, they forged a network of overlapping communities, organizations, and creative spaces—including the American Abstract Artists and the Atelier 17 print studio—that allowed them to support one another, exchange ideas, and exhibit their work. Women were key figures in such groups, often taking on leadership roles. They also wrote and lectured on abstraction and advanced methods of making, particularly in print media. Though many of these artists still deserve wider acclaim, their influence and ideas resonate even today.

Across her prolific career as a pioneering artist, educator, and activist, Emma Amos (American, 1937–2020) created boldly colorful and innovative works that explore the intersections of race and gender in American life. This exhibition surveys her body of work from the 1950s to the 2010s for the first time, spotlighting her inventive approach to printmaking, painting, and weaving as well as her signature practice of combining distinctive materials and artistic techniques. Amos’s works investigate identity and privilege while unsettling the lines between figuration and abstraction, craft and fine art, beauty and power.

Present Tense: New Prints, 2000–2005 is an exhibition that celebrates the institution’s 20th anniversary by revisiting works shown at IPCNY in the first five years of its founding New Prints program. From early prints by Julie Mehretu and Beatriz Milhazes to experiments in materiality by Roxy Paine and Melvin Edwards; from the socio-political gestures of Dread Scott and A.J. Bocchino to the technical mastery of Carol Wax and Lothar Osterburg—Present Tense brings together a selection of highlights that reflect just a handful of the practices and players that shaped IPCNY’s early years. It is co-organized by Anne Coffin, IPCNY’s founder and first director; and Deborah Cullen-Morales, currently a program officer at The Mellon Foundation, and previously executive director of The Bronx Museum of the Arts.

“Present Tense has hindsight: these were formative years for a new organization, for a new century, and for artists who were cutting their teeth on printmaking and deepening their commitment to the medium,” says IPCNY director Judy Hecker. “Here, we can re-meet these works that were fresh and formative in their day and remain relevant now.”

In 2000, IPCNY inaugurated its Chelsea exhibition space with New Prints 2000, the first in a free, open-call juried exhibition series designed to democratize access to exhibition opportunities by showing established and emerging artists side by side. Presented between two and four times annually in its early years, the exhibition program had shown some 500 artists by 2005. It aimed to reflect the immediacy, scope, and vitality of print production by the early 2000s, and mapped its networks of workshops, publishers, and printers. IPCNY was also launched in the context of rapidly expanding digital technologies, the post–9/11 political and cultural landscape, and a rapidly shifting and globalizing art world. Representing the vast range of approaches that defines the New Prints program, the works on view in Present Tense contend with identity, migration, materiality, and abstraction as they show how artists navigated the terrain of the early aughts.

For more information please visit the external link below.

This exhibition explores two parallel Japanese print-making movements through the Clark’s collection of shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga works. Although conceived in opposition, these two movements became deeply intertwined. By focusing on two key moments in the international exchange of Japanese prints in the twentieth century, the inter-war period and the post-war period, the exhibition considers how travel, tourism, and commercialism intersected within the medium of printmaking during the period.

Shin-hanga, or ‘New Prints,’ reached their zenith of popularity in the 1930s, following a concerted promotional effort by the publisher Watanabe, whose offices in Japan and London, as well as distribution routes to the United States, facilitated a renewed fervor for the Japanese print abroad. Following the model established by famed ukiyo-e printmakers during the Edo Period, shin-hanga prints were created through a collaborative process whereby work was divided amongst the artist, carver, printer, and publisher. The picturesque views of famous places (meishō) of Kawase Hasui and lyrical landscapes and dusk-shrouded street scenes of Yoshida Hiroshi constitute the majority of the Clark’s collection of shin-hanga works. Further, prints within the collection by artists such as Torii Kotondo, Tsuchiya Koitsu, and Takahashi Hiroaki would further add to visitors’ understanding of the movement.

These works will be put into conversation with the Clark’s collection of sōsaku-hanga, or, ‘Creative Prints’. Arising as a direct response to shin-hanga’s popularity, sōsaku hanga artists emphasized their individual agency in creating works of art. Indeed, two works within the collection by the sōsaku-hanga artist Saitō Kiyoshi are coupled with small slips of paper that declare the prints “self-carved and self-printed in Japan.” Although sōsaku-hanga prints did not receive the same amount of attention as their counterparts during the inter-war years, the movement’s works became ubiquitous after WWII.

For more information please visit the external link below.

Known as La Superba, Genoa was one of Italy’s most prosperous maritime powers in the Mediterranean from the late Middle Ages until the eighteenth century. Genoese naval prowess, critical to the outcome of the Crusades, gave rise to a thriving merchant class and led to the establishment of trading colonies throughout the region. By the sixteenth century, Genoa emerged as one of the foremost banking centers in Europe, and its leading families funded the construction of impressive architectural marvels. Bountiful commissions to decorate these buildings supported a flourishing community of local artists and attracted prominent painters and sculptors from across northern Europe to the Ligurian coast.

Visit the National Gallery of Art Library to see a selection of rare books and works on paper produced in the Republic of Genoa from the end of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. Drawn from the collections and library of the National Gallery, these works range from images of the grand architecture of Genoa’s palaces and mansions to elaborately illustrated editions of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, genealogical works about Genoa’s leading families, and biographies of Genoese artists alongside some of their drawings and etchings. Together, these works offer a glimpse into Genoa’s print culture at the height of the baroque period.

For more information please visit the external link below.

Gallery Talk: 5:30 PM with Halima Taha, PhD, curator

To register for Gallery Talk please copy and paste the below link into your browser:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pigment-of-the-soul-gallery-talk-tickets-187043360727?mc_cid=b93c19107e&mc_eid=830ccd574b

Opening Reception: 8–10 PM with wine and cheese
To register for the Reception please copy and paste the below link into your browser:
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The exhibit will run from October 22, 2021, through January 8, 2022

The exhibit and events are free, but you must pre-register.

All Guests Must Mask Up!

The Print Center is pleased to present Anastasia Samoylova: FloodZone and Back and Forth: The Space in Between, a solo show of work by Ivanco Talevski. Originally scheduled for presentation in 2020, the exhibitions were delayed by COVID-19 closures. We are delighted to launch the fall season by welcoming our community back to The Print Center to experience these two impactful and timely shows.

Anastasia Samoylova: FloodZone
We are honored to be the premier venue in the Northeast for FloodZone, which features photographic works that examine the omnipresent effects of climate change in Miami, by the internationally renowned Samoylova. Through photographs capturing the effects of rains and floods, she sounds the alarm on rising sea levels in all coastal areas, including our very own Philadelphia.

Anastasia Samoylova: FloodZone features large-scale photographic works, complemented by an installation of spreads from her recent publication of the same name, that examine the omnipresent effects of climate change on Miami, Florida. Initiated in 2016, the project, which also encompasses a book published in 2019 by Steidl, is an observational study subtly documenting human impact on the tropical landscape. Through photographs capturing the effects of rains and floods, she sounds the alarm on rising sea levels in all coastal areas, including our very own Philadelphia. It does not present us with the familiar images of climate catastrophe, but instead reveals the traces in the everyday – from corners of dilapidated buildings and pools of stagnant water to sidewalks with battered trees and skylines of upturned billboards. Samoylova masterfully wields the photographic tropes of juxtaposition and reflection to create impactful images that reveal the impact of unchecked commercial development on the environment and its human inhabitants, as well as the indigenous flora and fauna. Selections from “FloodZone” have been exhibited widely, including most recently at the Orlando Museum of Art and the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, Russia.

Back and Forth: The Space in Between
Back and Forth: The Space in Between is the first major solo show in the United States for Ivanco Talevski, known for his exceptional skill and compelling personal iconography. The exhibition maps the artist’s bifurcated existence between his adopted home of Philadelphia and his birthplace, Bitola, Macedonia. The immersive installation of new prints, drawings, projections and sound works investigates notions of memory, history and belonging, as well as the multiplicity of identities a single individual can embody.

Presented in The Print Center’s second floor galleries, the ambitious exhibition is comprised of an extensive group of new works based in the dualities of Talevski’s personal narrative: his childhood in Communist Yugoslavia and his adulthood in the United States, as well as his travels back-and-forth between his homes in Philadelphia and Bitola, Macedonia. Co-curated by The Print Center’s Executive Director Elizabeth Spungen and its Jensen Bryan Curator Ksenia Nouril, this exhibition reflects on how each of these places evoke the sense of home for Talevski. It includes a recent series of drawings, which he projected onto buildings in Bitola and then photographed. He layers and reseats salient graphic motifs: architectural structures, figures, foliage, mirrors and flags. Their amalgamation creates a space “in between,” an imagined community into which the artist welcomes us.

For more information about both exhibitions please visit the external link below.

This autumn, the Estorick’s entire collection of modern Italian art will go on show throughout the museum’s six galleries in a new exhibition, Estorick Collection Uncut. The top two galleries will be devoted to works by Giorgio Morandi (1890- 1964), and new responses to these by British artist Paul Coldwell (b.1952). This new display, A Still Life: Paul Coldwell in Dialogue with Giorgio Morandi, opens on 6 October and runs until 19 December 2021.

Coldwell’s prints, sculptures and poems, all created in London under lockdown conditions during 2020-21, will be shown alongside the Estorick’s holding of Morandi’s etchings and drawings. Coldwell finds parallels between his own lockdown experience and Morandi’s self-imposed restricted life in Bologna, where he lived and worked. Morandi rarely travelled, and his studio-cum-bedroom in the apartment he shared with his sisters provided the setting for his intimate still lifes. As Coldwell notes, “What for others might be seen as limitations, for Morandi became creative opportunities. His work speaks of the capacity of the imagination to escape from confinement, a sentiment that I hope might be found in my work as well.”

Coldwell’s own plaster and wood sculptures, prints and poems explore lockdown.
One of his poems begins:

Uncanny times.
The city, volume now turned down low,
muted.
uncanny
like Morandi’s bric a brac
quietly arranged in a row

Coldwell’s fascination with Morandi began after learning of his approach to printmaking. This entailed assembling still life objects on makeshift shelves, re- grouping them for days as dust settled, and finally drawing an image on a plate, before making a single immersion in acid. Coldwell points out: “It completely reversed the model of the printmaker as one who is wedded to the print room and
proposed an altogether more conceptual approach. To view Morandi’s prints as fully realised pictures in their own right, gave me confidence by showing that there is nothing to prevent printmaking being of equal importance to painting or sculpture.”

A limited edition boxed set of Coldwell’s poems with photographs of his sculptures will be available to buy from the Estorick Collection.

For more information please visit the external link below.

One exhibition, two shows, by Dan Welden divided in separate venues are being shown during the month of October. Noteworthy, the work consists primarily of “Mirror Images” based upon 50 year old large, resurrected, oxidized, corroded zinc plates.
Evolving from natures activity on the zinc, through salt air, raccoon urine and whatever else effected the metal, the 11 sets, (making 22 pried apart plates) provided a foundation for the artist to conceive its visual potential.

Known primarily as being the innovator of photopolymer printmaking, Dan Welden returned to his roots as a fledgling etcher with his ingenious use of a handmade auger as a drypoint tool, and a copper sulfate etch. The combination along with his imagination provided the artistic enhancement with the backdrop of his partner with “Nature”. This highly unique series, entitled “Aesop’s Fables” was conceived through the opposite characters created by the Greek Slave. The abstract images of the Grasshopper and the Ant along with the many other images are being exhibited from October 1-28 at the Ink-Shop Printmaking Center in Ithaca, New York while simultaneously being shown at The New Arts Program in Kutztown, Pennsylvania until December 17th.