Presenting a new perspective from which to interpret works in the Museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition positions works from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries in dialogue with twentieth-century works, traversing the boundary of time to draw visual and conceptual connections across time periods. The exhibition will be divided into three thematic sections: the use of late-medieval techniques (woodcuts and text-image compositions), references to medieval themes (Christian motifs and the personification of death during World War I), and the representation of medieval subjects (gothic architecture) in early-twentieth-century German art. In addition, German avant-garde artists’ commitment to express emotion in their artwork necessitated the incorporation of different sensory experiences into their visual compositions in a similar fashion as medieval Christian art. Medieval and modern artists’ common engagement with haptic and auditory senses in optical art will be explored in each of the three parts of the exhibition as well. The exhibition presents an analysis of western medieval forms, practices, and themes as contributors to the expression of emotion and spirituality in German Expressionism.

For many American artists, New York City in the early twentieth century epitomized modern life. Through a variety of media, they captured an increasingly diverse populace, expanding skyline, and changed public mores. The group of print artists featured in this exhibition resisted the trend towards abstraction, choosing instead to represent the human figure in the urban environment. They worked with etching needles, burnishers, plate, and stone to capture people at work, at play, and on the move. The resulting prints offer intriguing glimpses of a rapidly changing American metropolis.

A Wry Eye features a selection of prints, drawings, and sculpture by a small group of artists whose work has navigated wit, irony, and humor. A large part of the exhibition will be devoted to Jim Dine's recent works that deal with the psychologically complex Pinocchio figure, all of which were recently donated to the Spencer by the artist. Among the other works are Joyce Treiman's 1961 lithographic suite, The Mirrored Couple; the 12 lithographs that constitute Kiki Smith's Banshee Pearls; and several works by William Wiley. Common to these and the other exhibited works are elements of self-scrutiny, playfulness with a dash of the sinister, and wit with a sense of danger.

Save the Date!

Cork Printmakers presents FIRST EDITION - A Print Symposium at Millennium Hall, City Hall, Cork

"Multiple Dimensions: Exploring Printmaking as an expanded practice in contemporary visual culture"

Speakers include:

Susan Tallman, Editor in Chief, Art in Print, Chicago, USA
Michael Kempson, Convenor of Printmaking Studies & Director of Cicada Press, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Dr. Angela Griffith, History of Art & Architecture Department, Trinity College, Dublin
Jason Urban & Leslie Mutchler, both of The University of Texas, Austin, USA. Jason Urban is also Co-Editor of Printeresting.org, an award winning online resource for print miscellany.
Dr. Carinna Parraman, Professor in Design & Colour Print, UWE, Bristol; Co-Director, Centre for Fine Print Research (IMPACT is the CFPR's main Symposia)
& MANY MORE
Also featuring a trail of exhibitions in six venues across Cork City Centre - details to be announced! Tickets range from €40 (students / limited early bird tickets) - €65 (standard). Available from Monday April 3rd!

This one-day symposium, convened by two University of Nottingham colleagues, Professor Fintan Cullen (History of Art) and Dr Richard A Gaunt (History), seeks to interrogate the nature of the United Kingdom’s status as a global power in the long nineteenth century (c.1780-1920) by considering the varied ways in which it was viewed, and represented, in graphic satire during this period.

The speakers range from young to established scholars who will visit Nottingham from other parts of the UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany and Australia. Their papers will consider the UK’s global relationships from the perspective of the constituent parts of the UK (most especially England and Ireland) and from overseas, reflecting upon issues of race, gender, nationhood and ethnicity across the period in question.

Keynote speaker:
Professor Brian Maidment (Liverpool John Moores University)

Speakers:
Dr Allison Stagg (Freie Universitat Berlin)
Dr Matthew Potter (Northumbria University)
Dr Carly Hegenbarth (independent researcher, UK)
Dr Pawel Hamera (Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland)
Professor Peter Gray (Queen's University Belfast)
Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald (University College Dublin)
Dr Richard Scully (University of New England, Australia)
Professor Lesley Milne (University of Nottingham)

This first general EDPOP conference aims to bring together European specialists in the field of popular print. Although popular print culture has been studied intensively since the 1960’s, this was done mainly with a regional or national focus, based on the assumption that popular print in the vernacular had a limited geographical reach. Recent research has revealed however, that popular print culture had strong European characteristics and an often transnational infrastructure. In order to answer the question how European popular print culture was in the period 1450-1900, we have to discuss different starting points, approaches and methodologies.

In this conference we will explore comparative and intermedial approaches, long term publication histories of genres and titles, the benefits of databases and digital tools, the accessibility of collections, the reconstruction of production and distribution networks and the transnational dimensions of texts and images. This conference is one of the activities of the international network ‘European Dimensions of Popular Print Culture’ (see: https://edpop.wp.hum.uu.nl/), financed by NWO (Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research).

Organising committee: Massimo Rospocher (Trento): mrospocher@fbk.eu and Jeroen Salman (Utrecht): j.salman@uu.nl

Form in Fragments: Abstraction in German Art, 1906–1925 explores tendencies toward abstraction in German Expressionism, a movement that foregrounded representational approaches to art making. Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky, a founding member of the Expressionist artist’s group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), is typically credited with inventing a radical art of pure abstraction in 1911, becoming the first of several major artists across Europe to abandon the representation of objects, real or imagined, embracing instead the possibilities of line, shape, form, and color. Despite the ripple effects of Kandinsky’s innovation, his fellow Expressionists largely maintained their commitment to depicting nature, urban life, the human body, and the psyche with passion and verve. Importantly, however, they also complicated their representational images through formal strategies of dissolution, fragmentation, simplification, geometricization, and high contrast, often flirting with the edges of abstraction. Comprising over 60 works on paper drawn from LACMA’s collection, including works by Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc, as well as a selection of early abstract films by Hans Richter, this exhibition highlights the various ways in which abstraction informed and troubled Expressionist pictures.

Drawn principally from the Getty Research Institute's collection of prints, artists' books, journals, and manuscripts documenting the international concrete poetry movement, this exhibition focuses on the visual, verbal, and sonic experiments of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. Featuring works by foundational figures Augusto de Campos and Ian Hamilton Finlay, Concrete Poetry explores how these artists invented new forms such as cube poems and standing poems and continuously re-created their projects across media. Poetry by contemporaries including Henri Chopin, Ernst Jandl, Mary Ellen Solt, and Emmett Williams also plays a prominent role.

This exhibition introduces viewers to an ancient printing method – xylography, and shows woodcuts and wood engravings from representatives of the national schools of Latvia, Germany, the Netherlands, France, the Czech Republic and the USA, and their diverse artistic searches and styles. The most striking works from the NLL Konrāds Ubāns Art Reading Room Printing Collection will be on show at the exhibition. Free admission.

The exposition includes masterpieces form Western Europe's Gothic, Renaissance and baroque era, as well as xylography from the time of the 19th century Industrial Revolution. It also features Dutch and German Art Nouveau and Expressionist sheets, providing an opportunity for viewing examples of book illustrations, graphic art and bookplates. Xylography from the 21st century is represented by young Latvian authors – Reinis Gailītis, and Vivianna Maria Staņislavska who received the Jānis Baltvilks "Jaunaudze" Award for her illustrations for Ieva Samauskas's book "Skaļā klase" ("The Noisy Class") in 2016. The exhibition also includes Oļģerts Ābelīte's 1966 woodcut "Ziedi" ("Flowers"), which was purchased in 1968 by specialists at what was then the NLL's Small Prints, Cartographic and Graphic Documents Department's Graphic Documents Branch, and was the first work, which eventually led to the development of the collection.

The Konrads Ubāns Art Reading Room Collection is one of the largest and most important collections of prints in Latvia. It consists of about 10,000 items – works by artists and printers from different centuries hailing from Latvia, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, England, Russia and the USA. Significantly, xylography is only a small part of the reading room’s graphic art collection – it also includes etchings, lithographs, screen prints and works which have been created in other graphic techniques. The most significant components of the collection are American collector, bibliophile and graphic design researcher, James Howard Fraser’s graphics collection, which was added to the NLL's collection in 2012, and German art historian and collector Peter Böttger's voluminous collection of prints and drawings, which the reading room received as a bequest in 2016.

The exhibition Woodcuts from the Age of Titan showcases around 30 exquisite prints by 16th-century Venetian artists, with an emphasis on works emulating the premier painter of his day, Titian. Masters including Domenico Campagnola and Giuseppe Scolari are also represented with important works. These woodcuts of international stature, in some cases rarities, come from the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s own Department of Prints and Drawings and are being exhibited here for the first time on this scale. The iconography of the often large-format woodcuts includes Christian themes and landscape scenes. Other motifs are the female nude, portraits and anatomical depictions.

The works of graphic art on display demonstrate the Venetians’ pronounced interest in printmaking and thus an explicit engagement with reduced colouration. The selected artworks thus expand our knowledge of the versatile practice of Venetian artists during this period, as the lagoon city, in contrast to Florence, is generally seen as a centre of European painting in which colour took precedence over line.