Made in Germany Prints by Nine Contemporary Artists HIGHPOINTPRINTMAKING.ORG
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
PresstimeFALL/WINTER 2015 Claas Gutsche Vorgarten linocut, 2014 Made in Germany Prints by Nine Contemporary Artists HIGHPOINTPRINTMAKING.ORG 2 From Made in Germany the Directors Prints by Nine Contemporary Artists Greetings and welcome to fall! On view: September 18 – October 17, 2015 Opening reception on Friday, September 18, 6:30 – 9:00 p.m. Highpoint Editions was excited to be Highpoint is delighted to present Made …All works in the exhibition Made in participating in our third Baltimore Museum in Germany: Prints by Nine Contemporary Germany are original prints. For those of Art Print Fair this past spring. But we were Artists, an exhibition curated by Knut Willich unfamiliar with prints it is often not easy not prepared for the wonderful news we of Aspinwall Editions and showcasing a to understand …[while others] will go into would receive upon our arrival. We walked variety of prints by artists currently living and raptures by recognizing the unique value to into the keynote talk at the museum and working in Germany. The exhibition features collectors of the artist’s work. I hope visitors were greeted by Paula McCarthy Panczenko, work by Rolf Escher, Claas Gutsche, Volker to this exhibition will also go into raptures, the President of the esteemed International Lehnert, Jörg Rothenpieler, Maria Schleiner, and that they will take these impressions Fine Print Dealers Association (and Executive Wolfgang Troschke, Bettina van Haaren, home with them, either in their head or Director of Tandem Press) who let us know Matthias Weischer, and Ulrich Wolff. in their hands. That would give me great the IFPDA was inviting Highpoint Editions to In curating this selection of artwork, satisfaction.” be a member. Willich chose prints demonstrating a range of techniques and highlighting the unique Knut Willich lives and works in New York The news pretty much made our trip and printmaking style of each of these nine City and Rheine, Germany, where he runs the fair had not even started! The IFPDA artists. Aspinwall Editions, a fine art print publisher, has over 160 members from 13 countries dealer, and print studio, with his partner Ann including most of the studios whose Willich noted: Aspinwall. Willich was formerly the proprietor wonderful prints first inspired us. Being “Germany is the birthplace of printmaking of Atelier Limited in Münster, Germany, and nominated and invited to join the IFPDA techniques: letterpress printing, the taught printmaking there at the University is a wonderful acknowledgement of all development of lithography, technical of Applied Sciences. He is the founder and the dedication, hard work, creativity and image processing, and industrial printing, chairman of the Print Association Bentlage in support by countless Highpoint artists, staff, from the Heidelberger Tiegel press to Rheine, where he organizes an international collectors and supporters. modern offset presses. Printmaking itself, printmaking symposium every three years. as well as the use of various techniques, has Cheers and many thanks to you all! always been evolving. Today it is therefore Made in Germany will be on view in difficult to define the appearance of the Highpoint’s galleries from September 18 And, we hope to see you at Highpoint this traditional fine art print, since its manufacture through October 17, 2015. Fall and Winter to take part in openings, and presentation have invariably been Free Ink Day and classes of all kinds. transformed by the influence of how and why Please join us for an opening reception images are conceived and created in our on Friday, September 18 featuring a With best wishes, current society. Image production is greatly tour of the show by Ann Aspinwall, of influenced by our access to data, ease of Aspinwall Editions. Carla McGrath, Executive Director travel, and the media…. Cole Rogers, Artistic Director and Master Printer Highpoint Center for Printmaking is a fscal year 2015 recipient of a general operating grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. 3 Mungo Thomson: A New Collaboration vertical titles might suggest that human behavior, or our understanding of it, can be a prison, or a barricade against nature. So it’s important that the book spines are very formal and flat — a barrier — and that The Forest be open and enterable, like a door or window. This suggested a diptych to me in terms of scale and content. Pairing these two images — one neat and closed and one messy and open — pairs the content as well. SE: The oversized scale of these very much impacts one’s experience of the piece — how did you determine the size of the images? Artist Mungo Thomson MT: The scale is as large as we could go given the screens and paper standards available to us; I wanted something big and immersive, Highpoint Editions announces the release me. My dad had rows of them on the shelf, so you are able to feel you can step into a new print project by Los Angeles-based and they were acquired — collected — one that forest. I am also trying to encourage an artist Mungo Thomson. Thomson’s work is volume per month, by mail-order anthropological reading of them — to see deeply rooted in the legacy of conceptual subscription. I think they typify a certain them as frames through which we see. art — particularly its West Coast iteration, as late-20th-Century American zeitgeist of seen in the work of such pioneering artists as intellectual curiosity and even class mobility: SE: How was the process of collaborating with John Baldessari and Edward Ruscha — and they offered an aspirational bridge between a master printer different from or similar to the often has a strong connection between the layman and the specialist. One of their way you have approached other projects? language and image. His latest project for tag lines was “Become an Instant Expert”: Highpoint is no exception. Based on Time- they offered a fantasy of a common cultural MT: Many of the decisions I made about the Life® books, a popular series of general narrative and a knowable universe. This finishing and the scale have to do with the interest volumes published in the sixties and notion has now been completely fractured properties and standards in the Highpoint seventies, the prints focus on two subject areas by the Internet, but I’m interested in the way shop. Just as some of these Time-Life® books within the series: Human Behavior (published Time-Life® books, covering such a vast range have little bells and whistles in their printing, in 1976) and the Nature Library (published in of subjects, suggested a kind of proto- with tipped-in photographs and foil text on 1961). The works relate to a series of mirrored Internet themselves. I’ve been collecting top of cloth bindings and varnish, Highpoint paintings the artist made in 2012, which Time-Life® books for a few years and offered some of those same options for our replicate the format and typography of TIME® working on a stop-motion film project about prints. So I liked that symmetry. I think there magazine on their surface while also reflecting them. When Highpoint asked me to do a is probably even some overlap between the the viewer. Siri Engberg discussed with print, I was in the process of considering the heyday of fine art printmaking and Time-Life® Thomson his approach to this recent project: material for the film. books. Working with a master printer was different for me because I spend so much SE: What drew you to the Time-Life® book SE: What was your thinking behind the more time in the realm of more digital and series as subject matter? sequencing of the book spines in the first on-demand production modes, but making print? I’m interested in the freeform narrative a print of this complexity takes a different MT: I grew up in a Northern California of these — how the titles evolve from the kind of time. The process is absolutely college town in the 1970s and 80s, universal to the dark, and then how The Forest painstaking, but Cole is very thorough — he surrounded by academicism and suburban suggests something far more ambiguous. made sure I saw the best possible iteration of American middle-class normalcy, and also by that idea before letting me give up on it. the iconography of all the fringe mysticisms MT: The flat wall of titles — Language, and activisms that flourished in that place How We Learn, The Family, Status and Siri Engberg is Senior Curator of Visual Arts at and time. Everything from Bob Dylan Conformity, Stress, Crime, The Individual, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. and Carl Sagan to National Geographic® etc., are essentially an itemized list of how to whale song records and wind chimes. we organize civilization — which contrasts Time-Life® books exist within that rubric for with a picture of wilderness. The gold HIGHPOINTPRINTMAKING.ORG 4 Highpoint Editions News Artist Jim Hodges and Master Printer Cole Rogers during signing of Winter Speaks Jim Hodges, Winter Speaks, intaglio, chine collé & screenprinting, edition of 28, 2015 New Collaborations as his unique language of abstraction. What Highpoint Editions: perhaps may not translate in the photograph Now a member of IFPDA Jim Hodges is just how complex and dimensional Jim’s This spring, Highpoint Editions released rendering is here through the medium of Highpoint Editions is honored to have been Winter Speaks, Jim Hodges’ limited edition printmaking!” — Olga Viso, Director, Walker invited to join the International Fine Print print, a co-publication by Highpoint Editions Art Center Dealers Association (IFPDA), a nonprofit and the Walker Art Center.