Humans have been creating prints for centuries. The list of printers contains such famous artists as Rembrandt van Rijn, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Andy Warhol.
In fact, their work is in “An Inquisitive Eye, Seeing Into Prints” a new exhibit at the University of New Mexico Art Museum.
The exhibit offers a long view: There are prints – and the printing processes that have been used to create them – from 1493 to the present.
| If you go WHAT: “An Inquisitive Eye, Seeing Into Prints” WHEN: Through Dec. 18. Museum hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays WHERE: Clinton Adams Gallery, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Center for the Arts, UNM main campus HOW MUCH: Free |
About 12 printing processes are represented in the exhibit, among them woodcuts, etchings, aquatints, engravings, lithographs and screenprints.
In all, there are 71 prints and images from three books in the exhibit.
The 1971 Warhol screenprint, titled “Electric Chairs,” is from a portfolio of 10 prints that are based on the artist’s paintings. The paintings were, in turn, made from a press photograph of the actual electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York that was used to execute Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage.
You also will encounter a Wassily Kandinsky 1911 woodcut. It’s a motif from “Improvisation 10,” an illustration from “Klänge.”
Klänge, which translates as “sound,” was Kandinsky’s effort to fuse imagery with poetry and sounds made by speaking words to create “a new synthetic work.”
Michele M. Penhall, the museum’s curator of prints and photographs, said in an email that she wanted to show the large scope of the UNM Art Museum’s collection “in terms of historical, modern and contemporary prints with some of our most interesting and seldom exhibited works …
“It is an opportunity to see the entire history of printmaking in one room and to see the same process executed to very different results by different artists over a long period of time.”
For example, Penhall wrote, there is a woodcut folio showing ecclesiastical figures from the 1493 “World Chronicle” also known as “Nuremberg Chronicle” – the earliest work in the exhibit. It is next to a linocut by Picasso from 1963. On the other side of the Picasso is a woodcut that Lucas Cranach made in 1509.
The prints and books in the exhibit are from the museum’s permanent collection.
“This exhibition,” Penhall said in her curatorial statement for the exhibit, “provides an occasion to view significant prints and rare printed books drawn from the museum’s holdings which embrace the critical and aesthetic breadth of the history of the printed image.”
She added in her email that as with many institutions with large permanent collections, “it is a curatorial challenge to make use of the collection in new and innovative ways that also address the museum’s educational mission.”
The museum, Penhall said, likes to have exhibits that dovetail with courses taught in UNM’s Department of Art and Art History.
A UNM Graphic Arts I class is to visit the exhibit later this month, Penhall said.
These other exhibits simultaneously opened with “An Inquisitive Eye” this weekend at the UNM Art Museum:
• “Re-Imagining American Identities,” which aims to provoke discussion on how we Americans, individually and collectively, define ourselves. The portraits in the exhibit are by such photographers as Dorothea Lange, Mathew Brady, Edward S. Curtis and Miguel Gandert.
• “Sinners and Saints,” religious paintings from the 15th-century Renaissance through the 19th-century Neoclassical period in Europe and the New World.
• Richard Deacon’s 2007 “Dead Leg,” a sculpture composed of bent and twisted oak timbers bound together in groups with custom-fabricated steel couplings.
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