Fine Art screenprinting continues to flourish in South Africa as is evident in the group of young and emerging artists whose work is showcased on this exciting exhibition. The exhibition was collaboratively curated with three Johannesburg printing studios - Artists Proof Studio, Prints on Paper and Division of Visual Arts, Wits School of Arts (DIVA) - who each used their own criteria to select works.

*Also on view "Warhol Unscreened: Artworks from the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Collection" (27 July - 8 Oct 2017).

Katsushika Hokusai is regarded as one of the most influential and creative minds in the history of Japanese art. His unique social observations, innovative approach to design and mastery of the brush made him famous in Edo-period Japan and globally recognised within a decade of his death.

The self-described ‘Old man mad about drawing’ was known by at least thirty names during his lifetime and was renowned for his unconventional behaviour. Despite his fame, Hokusai never attained financial success and his years of greatest artistic production were spent in poverty. He travelled and moved his resting place and studio regularly, finding inspiration for his unique style through close observations of nature and interactions with ordinary people.

In 1909 the NGV purchased five works from Hokusai’s iconic Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji series, including his most celebrated image The great wave off Kanagawa (The great wave), 1830–34; two works from his A Tour to the Waterfalls in Various Provinces series; and four other major works. These astute acquisitions established a legacy of Japanese art in Australia that has now extended for more than one hundred years.

Hokusai features 176 works from the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum, Matsumoto, and the NGV Collection that encompass the artist’s remarkable seventy-year career. For the first time in Australia, seven of Hokusai’s major series, including Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji, 1830–34; A Tour to the Waterfalls in Various Provinces, c. 1832; Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces, c. 1834; Eight Views of the Ryūkyū Islands; and One Hundred Ghost Stories, c. 1831, are on display, as well as selected works representing his great passion for the classical subjects of birds and flowers and historical poetry. A selection of rare prints and paintings that show the stylistic and thematic changes of Hokusai’s formative years, as well as three sets of illustrated books that highlight the artist’s masterful and compositionally innovative book illustrations, including the complete set of fifteen volumes of Hokusai Manga, complete this comprehensive insight into the life and times of this major figure.

The Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts has recently launched a new interactive website featuring extensive research into its founding collection donated by Fred Grunwald. In addition to digitized archival documents about the Grunwald family and the Grunwald Center's early history, the website features essays putting Grunwald's collection -- its seizure by the Nazis and reconstitution in America -- into focus.

The website includes a selection of more than 1,500 of the roughly 3,500 works donated by Fred Grunwald and his heirs that are currently housed at the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum, as well as archival materials related to Fred Grunwald's personal and collecting history. The extensive documentation assembled here includes newspaper articles, exhibition catalogues, postwar restitution claims, personal correspondence, probate documents, and dealer records drawn from multiple sources in the United States and Europe. This resource offers print scholars new avenues for conducting otherwise difficult provenance research, and presents the most authoritative exploration to date of the history and development of one of UCLA's most treasured collections.

Francisco de Goya worked in a politically turbulent period of Spanish history, notoriously articulating his fears and observations through his masterful treatment of light and shadow in his prints.

This display of examples from the Barber’s collection places five of Goya’s enigmatic works among those by other Spanish artists, such as Picasso and Miró, who also delved into ideas of light and shadow through subject matter and printmaking.

In the history of European civilization, the term Renaissance describes a surge of interest in ancient Greek and Roman knowledge, literature, and art that began around 1400 and continued into the 16th century. The Renaissance originated in Italy when scholars actively began reading and translating long-forgotten texts by classical authors. The advent of the printing press in the mid-1400s helped to spread these texts, which in turn influenced the larger philosophical movement known as Humanism, which emphasized the value of humanity and stressed the importance of individual expression, curiosity in the natural world, and an appreciation of worldly pleasures. Around the same time, ancient sculptures and buildings were being rediscovered and excavated. Artists incorporated the forms they observed in ancient art and architecture into new sculptures, paintings, buildings, and decorative arts. Meanwhile, the development of the print, an invention capable of replicating hundreds of images from a single woodblock or metal plate, helped disseminated knowledge of classical styles. Gods and Heroes focuses on this attraction to antiquity, bringing together a group of prints, drawings, and sculptures from the Cleveland Museum of Art's collection to explore ways that that Renaissance artists and their patrons endeavored to embrace and surpass the legends of their ancient heritage. Featuring over 80 works, the exhibition includes engravings of Raphael’s Apollo on Parnassus and Michelangelo’s Fall of Phaeton; Andrea Andreani's frieze of chiaroscuro woodcuts reproducing Andrea Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar; Nicolo della Casa's engraving of Henri II as a Roman Emperor; and a group of prints dedicated to the ever-popular hero Hercules.

On October 31, 1517, German priest Martin Luther, who believed church doctrines created an ever-growing gap between believers and God, is said to have posted a document of what today are called the “95 theses”—his specific disputes—to the door of a church of a church in Wittenberg to contest recent practices of the Catholic Church. What followed was a flurry of written arguments and ideas put forward by scholars, clerics, statesmen, and lay believers to fuel a movement called the Reformation. On the 500th anniversary of Luther’s famous act, The Huntington presents an exhibition of about 50 rare manuscripts, books, and prints made between the 1400s and 1648 (the end of the Thirty Years' War) to address the power of the written word and the relationship between it and radical change within a specific historical moment and geographical region. The exhibition will also pose the question: What is so important to you that you would nail a statement about it in a public place for all to see?

This exhibition will feature dynamic graphic works from the University Print Collection--many on view for the first time--by contemporary Latin American artists.

Related Events -----
"Lecture: Old 'New Media': Xerox Art in Brazil"
Mário Ramiro, Knapp Chair
Monday, September 25 at 6 p.m.
Manchester Auditorium, Manchester Hall
Free admission and reception to follow.

Registration deadline: September 8, 2017
Contact: beyond-reproduction-2017@gmx.de

For the lectures on 19th september we kindly ask for registration via email no later than 8th September 2017.

We would like to invite all interested guests to the public evening lecture of Dr. Rudolf Rieger in the print room of the Cabinet of Prints, Drawings and Photographs on 18th September 2017 at 6.30 pm.

Monday, 18.09.2017
6:30pm Public evening lecture in the study room of the Kupferstich-Cabinet

Dr. Rudolf Rieger (Bonn)
Adam von Bartsch (1757-1821) as a graphic artist: the reproduction of old masters' manuals between facsimile claims, normative presuppositions, and artistic interpretation


Tuesday, September 19, 2017, Hans-Nadler-Saal, Residenzschloss, Dresden

Session I: Collecting interpretive graphics in the course of time / Collecting Interpretative Prints - Now and Then

Session II: Translation and implementation / Translation and Technique

Session III: Mobile Motifs and Changes of Meaning

Session IV: Interpretation Graphs as Sources for the Recitative History of Art / Interpretative Prints as Sources for the History of Reception

Along with Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) numbers among the art-world greats of the second half of the 20th century. All three began their careers as young artists in the post-war period, when people still believed, with an optimism difficult to understand today, that art could do anything. And their understanding of art is correspondingly all-encompassing. For the first, everything is beautiful; for the second, everyone is an artist; and the third, Rauschenberg, sees material for his art in everything around him. Thanks to a generous donation from the Hamburg collector Claus von der Osten, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg is devoting an exhibition to Rauschenberg, comprising prints and posters from his extensive collection. Because of this donation, the MKG boasts the world’s most comprehensive collection of its kind with approximately 160 posters designed by Rauschenberg. The exhibition of 120 works represents the most comprehensive survey of this facet of his oeuvre ever to go on show. Robert Rauschenberg, who grew up in the small town of Port Arthur, Texas, attended art academies from 1947 to 1951 in Kansas, Paris, North Carolina, and New York. He created his two most famous series, the Combines and the Silkscreen Paintings, in 1954 and 1962 respectively. From then on, new series followed regularly, in which Rauschenberg constantly found variations on his typical way of working, employing new techniques, tools, and materials and exploring their connections with new visual ideas. There are, among others, the Cardboard Series (wall reliefs made of previously used, deconstructed boxes), the Jammers (compositions made of translucent coloured fabrics), and large-scale works such as the Quarter Mile or 2 Furlong Piece or Quake in Paradise, a four-piece installation of printed aluminum plates.

Tacoma Art Museum’s Haub Curator of Western American Art, Faith Brower, has partnered with guest curator and Haub Fellow, India Young, from Victoria, B.C., to present this selection of approximately 50 prints.

For generations, Northwest Coast Native American and First Nations artists developed visual languages made up of colors, lines, shapes and space. These centuries-old designs can be recognized on cultural objects including basketry, carvings, blankets, and jewelry. When Northwest Coast artists began printmaking in the 1960s, they translated their graphic languages onto a flat surface. The reproducible print medium raised visibility for Indigenous arts in the Northwest and beyond.

This exhibition provides a survey of Indigenous artists who have defined six decades of printmaking in the Pacific Northwest. Through their prints, these artists share knowledge about the diverse cultures in the region, while sustaining their art and history. Some of this artwork focuses on culturally specific design motifs that can identify a nation or tribe within the region. Others affirm how artists have used the print medium to reexamine the role of women’s histories within Northwest Coast communities. Still other works illuminate the passing of knowledge between generations.

Some of the printmaking from the Northwest Coast can be immediately recognized by high-contrast, black and red graphics. Despite some assumptions that Northwest Coast art is limited to this kind of imagery, Indigenous printmaking in the region has always been exploratory and innovative. Through the print medium artists expand on their visual languages to create works that broaden the scope of Northwest Coast art.