Helsinki-based artist Maija Luutonen works primarily with painting by exploring and expanding its boundaries and potential. In her art Luutonen turns a two-dimensional medium – painting on paper – into three-dimensional installations. For the show at Kiasma, Luutonen will create a new piece to be exhibited in the Studio K gallery and which will make use of the distinctive properties of the space.

Luutonen (b. 1978) graduated with an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. She has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Finland and in the Baltic and Nordic countries. Luutonen has work in several Finnish art collections. She was awarded the Ducat Prize by the Finnish Art Society in 2012.

Kiasma Commission by Kordelin
Maija Luutonen is the first Kiasma Commission by Kordelin artist. Kiasma Commission by Kordelin is a new Finnish concept for promoting and producing contemporary art. Centring around the production of one project every year, the concept aims to provide international exposure for emerging Finnish artists and for Finnish contemporary art. The project is funded by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation.

Since the late 1990s, artist Jennifer Bornstein has worked with a diversity of media to address a consistent set of interconnected concerns—artistic collaboration, archival research, technologies of image production, and how different media utilized across time can construct identity and convey social and political content.

For Currents 115, Bornstein will exhibit works that include a group of etchings, photogravures, and photographs, and 1:1 scale relief-type prints of the interior of a house in London. Rounding out the exhibition is a video work that experiments with the technological history of moving-image media using footage from three different technologies, 16 mm film, standard definition video, and high-definition digital video.

Bornstein is the recipient of the 2017-2018 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship, which includes a residency at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and an exhibition in the Currents series, the Museum's long-running program showcasing contemporary art. Bornstein has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Currents 115: Jennifer Bornstein is curated by Hannah Klemm, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art with Molly Moog, research assistant, and Heather Hughes, senior research assistant and print study room manager. This presentation is generously supported by the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Endowment Fund.

In name, a guidebook assures the reader of clarification and direction, but the term only seems to neatly define what to expect from these volumes. Instead, the claim to make sense of the unknown is complicated by shifting narrative strategies, choices of language, and the inclusion of illustrations. Recent interest in issues of orientation and subjectivity has shed new light on guidebooks; in addition, a profusion of new printed and digital editions of these works have reinvigorated a discussion of guidebooks as a form of knowledge produced at the intersection of description and dispersal. This workshop investigates the genre’s development in Naples and its resonance in a wider Italian context. While similar interest in the description of major cities grew across Europe, the richness of Neapolitan production and shared concerns around the antique, artistic, and natural landscapes make it a promising point of departure. Examining these guides as negotiations of the city's extraordinary and ordinary dimensions will open up the potentials and limitations of a tool intended to traverse time and space.

Chiara De Caprio (Naples)
Immagini di città, immagini di lingue

Harald Hendrix (Rome)
L’invenzione di un nuovo prodotto editoriale: le prime guide illustrate dedicate a Napoli e al suo distretto

Lorenza Gianfrancesco (Chichester)
Guidebooks in early seventeenth-century Naples: Patronage, propaganda and civic identity

Melissa Calaresu (Cambridge)
Making Naples: Illustrated guidebooks and the creation of a visual tradition

Niall Atkinson (Chicago)
Early modern Florentines abroad: Measuring, counting, and describing foreign cities

Francesco Caglioti (Naples)
Luoghi reali e <> nelle guide e nelle visite di Napoli: per un’elaborazione digitale

Climate change, deglaciation, and changing water levels: for decades, glaciologists have been studying glacial change and its impact on the environment. What happens when an artist joins the researchers? Argentinian artist Irene Kopelman accompanied an expedition. She spoke to the experts. She learned how the constantly changing forms of glaciers are scientifically recorded. And she made drawings. The results of her artistic explorations take the form of fascinating images reduced to structural outlines.

Irene Kopelman (*1974) is known for her drawings. They are produced in the open air, yet only loosely related to the places she captures with her pencil. This Argentinian artist, who divides her time between Amsterdam and Argentina, is not a solitary player in the midst of nature, but actually accompanies scientists on their expeditions. In 2010, she embarked on a sailing ship expedition to Antarctica and tried, during the expedition, to capture the mountainous horizons on paper – in spite of extremely difficult weather conditions with dense fog, icy winds, snowfall and heavy seas.

Two years later, she launched into another project relating to mountains. This time, the focus of her interest was to be the glaciers and avalanches of the Swiss Alps. A residency awarded by the Laurenz-Haus Foundation in Basel (2012-13) provided the opportunity of venturing into the mountains with scientists and researchers from the “World Glacier Monitoring Service” and the “Swiss Federal Insitute for Forest Snow and Landscape”. Braving the elements, remote locations and weather conditions (which often hampered her drawing), she learned what she could from the specialists. Kopelman began to gain an understanding of the complexity of the glaciers and their constantly evolving forms, discovering how these have been analysed and catalogued by researchers. Her participation in expeditions and her willingness to adapt to the rhythms of the expedition as well as to the topographical situations, are an essential part of her work. This painstaking artistic research has resulted in exquisitely delicate drawings, as well as books describing her participation in the expeditions and a fresh analysis of the concept of representation.

45-65 Peckham Road London SE5 8UF

William Kentridge, born in South Africa, is one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation, working across media that include drawing, film, performance, prints and sculpture leaving a legacy of works which ‘declare his allegiance to the humanist project and to a version of realism and social engagement’ (Roger Malbert). Printmaking has been close to the centre of his practice as an artist throughout and this conversation between Kentridge and Professor Paul Coldwell will focus on his approach to the print and how it has informed his wider practice.

Book your place by clicking on the 'External Link' below.

Celebrating the 400th anniversary of the birth of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and timed to coincide with the end of the National Gallery’s exhibition of Murillo’s self-portraits, this symposium examines the legacy of one of Spain’s most celebrated painters. It is organised by ARTES – the Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group – in association with The Courtauld, the Spanish Embassy in London, the Instituto Cervantes and the Colnaghi Foundation. Attendees also have the opportunity to examine some of Murillo's drawings in the collections of The Courtauld Gallery, and can enjoy a wine and tapas reception after the symposium, as well as a concert of music from Golden Age Spain in Kings College London, a short walk from The Courtauld (please note that separate booking is required for the concert, which is free).

13:00 - 14:30 Opportunity to visit the drawings by Murillo and other Spanish masters in the Courtauld Prints and Drawings Study Room

14:30 Welcome

14:35 - 15:05 Manuela Mena Marqués, Senior Curator of 18th Century Painting and Goya, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid: "Murillo the Draughtsman"

15:05 - 15:35 Xanthe Brooke, Curator of Continental European Art, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool: "Murillo's Virgin and Child in Glory: The Afterlife of a Great Baroque Altarpiece"

15:35 - 16:05 Benito Navarrete Prieto, Professor, History of Art at the University of Alcala and Director of the Department of History and Philosophy: "Empathy and Prestige: The Real Reasons for Collecting Murillo's Work in the Seville of his Patrons"

16:05 - 16:35 Tea

16:35 - 17:05 Laura Alba Carcelén, Conservation Scientist, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid': "At Murillo's Workshop: Pictorial Materials and Procedures”

17:05 - 17:35 Mairi Macdonald, Birkbeck College, University of London: "Murillo and Depictions of Poverty"

17:35 - 17:55 Discussion and close

18:00 - 19:00 Drinks and tapas

19:30 Invitation to attend a free concert of Spanish Renaissance and Baroque music organised by the Instituto Cervantes in Kings College Chapel (next door to the Courtauld).

For tickets to the conference, please click on the 'External Link' below.

General public £16

Students £11

This exhibition presents a particular moment of Chinese engraving between 1980 and 1988. From 1978, after the death of Mao Zedong (1976), China began a period of reforms characterized by openness to the West and economic development . The engraving artists bear witness to this transformation by producing original and surprising images. The diversity of subjects and styles reveals, in these engravings, the telescoping between traditional life and modern world.

The 34 works presented here were selected from a set of 87 engravings, given by the artists at the Musée de Gravelines in 1988, with the support of the Cultural Association Europe Asia, Paris.

Although the Chinese invented print, nearly 1600 years ago, and inspired in particular the famous Japanese prints, Chinese engraving remains relatively unknown.

Around the 80s, wood engraving was still practiced in the workshops. It is produced by engravers who often work as teachers in art schools. Far from avant-gardes and in the context of an almost non-existent art market, these engravings appear, for a time, to be a hinge between classical painting and folk art.


*** Also on view "Meandering paths, Paris-Amsterdam - Wendelien Schönfeld / Pascale Hémery" (April 7 - September 16, 2018)

W. Schönfeld and P. Hémery share the acuteness of a look at the world, the choice of figuration for the sensible transcription of reality. Their way of apprehending creation naturally favored their meeting. The museum presents in parallel the graphic work of the two artists. Beyond figuration, the exhibition Pathways of the Cross reveals a careful look at everyday landscapes.

Pascale travels to major cities, New York, London, Naples, Marseille. His universe is built, most often inspired by architecture. The man, invisible in these images, is nevertheless present in his views of cities. His presence is suggested by the way he lives in space and changes it constantly. It is through man that the city spreads, both ordered and anarchic. The human presence is also the point of view that the artist carries. P. Hémery is fond of the plunging views, the complex constructions in which the observer makes his way. The artist transfigures his vision by paying particular attention to the light, for the construction of forms.

For W. Schönfeld, the meeting is at the center of his research, the discovery of a place, the feeling of an atmosphere through the human presence. Indeed, she declares to make double portraits, that of a person and his environment. She represents people at work, close relatives in their intimacy. His landscapes are in motion by the play of lights, the changing skies, reflections along the water. Attempt to remember the moment. Each color takes its place in the composition, according to the artist "colors play together and must be orchestrated", thus expressing the synthesis of lived moments.

W. Schönfeld and P. Hémery practice different mediums but have in common to return constantly to the color woodcut. This technique may seem complex, for example, it requires multiplying the boards, the superposition of the colors constructing the image. This practice requires anticipating each step and may seem anachronistic in the era of rapid reproduction of images. However, it is the constraints of engraved wood that favor the production of the image.

For these artists the first discipline is that of the practice of drawing, it is underlying the engravings. Then the wood leads them to interpret the line, to propose a synthetic vision. The constraints of the material, the sense of the fiber, the radical choices implied by the cutting of forms, participate in this commitment. Useless details and decorative effects do not resist gouge. The harmony is built as and when passages under the press, where each color and each form take their rightful place.

With this exhibition, the medium of sketchbook is for the very first time taking centre stage as the focus of a comprehensive museum presentation. The Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München preserves in its collection some 260 sketchbooks dating from the 18th century onwards through to the present day. It comprises works by painters, draughtsmen, sculptors and architects, as well as travel sketchbooks. Based on this rich stock of material, the exhibition traces the history of this medium’s development and devises a typology from it. Over the centuries right through to the present day encounters and dialogues have evolved between sketchbooks, artists and observers.

The Fred Sandback archive is pleased to announce the launch of the Sandback print catalogue as part of our new website.

The Fred Sandback Catalogue of Graphic Works provides comprehensive documentation of the artist’s graphic work of more than four decades. Sandback had brought inventiveness, pictorial elegance, and pure skill to his printmaking endeavors, creating a body of work of lasting importance.

David Krut Projects Cape Town is pleased to present The Colourist Manifesto, a group exhibition of David Krut associated artists, working with colour in print, opening on Saturday the 17th of March 2018. Traditionally, printmaking has existed within a monochromatic realm. However, there are artists who have worked in the David Krut Workshop (DKW) that have pushed the boundaries of printmaking through the use of colour. It is through this showcase, accompanied by The Colourist Manifesto, that we explore and celebrate the use of colour in various printmaking techniques and the artist’s and DKW’s unique collaborative approach to printmaking.

The Colourist Manifesto booklet includes the artist’s relationship with colour in printmaking, their use of techniques and influences relating to the use of colour in print. The exhibition and manifesto acts as a platform to inform the public about the possibilities of printmaking.; which isn’t as black and white as it may seem.