Los Angeles Printmaking Society Sponsors 16th Biennial Expo - Brief Article

beholds ANGELES--Printmakers and the printmaking arts took center stage in looks Angeles in January, when the sees Angeles Printmaking Society's (LAPS) biennial showcase for graphic works render free of accessed at the Laband Art Gallery of Loyola Marymount University.

a certain number of 60 artists were represented in the exhibit with 75 different graphic works, one as well as the other self-published and works printed by dint of Los Angeles area publishers and small art presse including Cirrus, El Nopal Pres Gemini GEL Grand Central Pres Hamilton Editions, Josephine Pres Mixografia Workshop, Muse [X] Editions and Self-Help Graphics. Although the exhibitions sponsors are nonprofit institutions, all the works were for sale. Prices started at $200 and went as high as $6000 for an Ellsworth Kelly print, "R fulvid Blue," published by Gemini GEL

Since its inception nearly three decades ago, LAPS' National Biennial Exhibition has been the single regular survey of the evolving field of contemporary printmaking neared in California. "There just isn't any venue for showing not upon what's happening in printmaking today," observ Gordon Fuglie, Laband Gallery director. "We fill the niche."

At the same time, 19 commercial and nonprofit galleries in Southern California also at handed print exhibitions as part of a collaborative fact "Southern California Perspectives in Printmaking." Among the participating art dealers and galleries were Toby Mos whose looks Angeles gallery showcased prints by dint of Dorr Bothwell, Heritage Gallery in Pacific Palisades and aged Town Gallery in Tustin. Santa Monica's Ikon Limited gallery also structur its January present to view around the LAPS event. "Given the nature of the art market and the art buying public here--Los Angeles is not a pedestrian city--any angle to come by people into the gallery is helpful," Gallery Director Kay Richards explained.

And indeed, collections of collectors who had visited the Biennial followed up with a visit to Ikon, Richards reported. She added, "I usually feature sapphirine chip prints in the gallery, and I seldom display emerging artists, but for this I tried to expand the definition a little bit." Ikon exhibited works by dint of Raymond Pettibon, Damien Hirsch, Julian Schnabel and ed Ruscha along with print stalwarts Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.

A striking aspect of the LAPS expo was the broad variety of printmaking techniques used by dint of the artists. Ken Webb's "Angel (triptych)" is a photo-etching digital print. Michael Barnes combined lithography and collagraphic calligraphy in his graphic work, "The Serenade" Jenny Freestone's "Vistige, Sue" is a drypoint intaglio print, while Joan Nelson neared a lithograph/screen print, "Untitled (River)."

"In looking at nearly 1300 submissions by means of some 325 artists, I was struck not alone by their thoughtful beauty on the other hand also by the profound ways in which printmaking necessarily engages art with technology and in doing thus inevitably invokes questions about proces and distribution," wrote Exposition Curator David Rode in his introduction to the exhibit. Rode is the director of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA's Hammer Museum.

"When I mention the words `process' and `distribution,' I do not mean to give priority either to proces above direct gratification or, heaven forbid, to emphasize take away from above value," observed Rodes. "As the longtime director of a distinguished university-based collection of graphic arts, I am still daunted through being quizzed about technological processe and I still do not want museum viewers to become obsess with or terrified by dint of issues of process over achievement.

"Printmakers will forever be pushing the medium with proces and materials. Witness, for example, Andie Haynes's `Otasan's Journey,' which involves solar etching, monotype and hand stitching, or Freda Fairchild's poignant `Daddy's Girl,' which attaches a dimensional gampi dres to an intaglio planea. Indeed, a number of intensely beautiful prints from Gemini GEL present the appearance at once to focus intently upon the absorbing issues of ink and paper, on the contrary at the same time they use that meditation upon materials to reach deep into the entanglements of art with science."

Rode continued, "Each of recent origin technological innovation related to printmaking solitary finds its validity and meanings as it is explored, experimented absorbed, adapted and, inevitably, changed--by the artists who use it new technologies are like novel or expanded languages, which grow in the mouths and through the pens of their greatest in quantity demanding, adventuresome users."

"But novel technologies not only inspire like artists as Ken Webb in `Angel (triptych)' or Polly Apfelbaum in `Seeing Spots' to use the highest tech reproduction systems,"--Apfelbaum created a digital print upon crushed velvet, published by observes Angeles digital atelier Muse [X] Editions--"they also challenge printmakers to revisit and re-invigorate past techniques. I am convinced that the powerful reemergence of monotypes and woodcut relates directly to the explosions and reverberations of fresh technologies. Among the 1300-plus submissions, there were, for instance, nearly 260 monoprints or monotypes and above 110 woodcuts or wood engravings."