The eighteenth-century Antwerp artist Antoine Overlaet, by profession a ‘broodbakker’, was also a meticulous and skilled draughtsman who specialised in copies of prints, primarily by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists, notably by Rembrandt (1606-1669) and after Rubens (1577-1640) and Teniers (1610-1690).1 In addition, he made careful copies of Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677) and some French artists including Jacques Callot (1592-1635) and Claude Mellan (1598-1688). Overlaet sought to mimic to an uncanny extent in pen and brown ink the distinct qualities of the techniques of drypoint, etching and engraving.

Orit Hofshi is one of a number of contemporary artists who embrace printmaking processes in the production of expansive works that are materially visceral, politically smart and emotionally compelling. In the vein of Anselm Kiefer, Christiane Baumgartner, Swoon and Nicola López, Hofshi employs the tools and techniques of relief printmaking and matrices on an expansive scale, and like them she uses her work to address the moral and political complexities of her cultural inheritance. For Hofshi as an Israeli, this encompasses not just ethnic conflict but the fundaments of land, water and time.