CHICHESTER.- Pallant House Gallery is presenting a major exhibition exploring 60 years of British printmaking from the 1960s to the present day. Drawing on the gallery’s remarkable collection of modern and contemporary prints, Hockney to Himid: 60 Years of British Printmaking features over 100 prints by 90 artists, including Frank Auerbach, Gillian Ayres, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Elisabeth Frink, Anthea Hamilton, Richard Hamilton, Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Lubaina Himid, Anish Kapoor, Henry Moore, Chris Ofili, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Graham Sutherland, Julian Trevelyan and Gillian Wearing.
From the Pop artists of the swinging Sixties and abstract artists working in St Ives, to the Scottish contemporary art scene and the YBAs in the 2000s, the exhibition celebrates a transformational period in British art through the medium of printmaking.
The wide-ranging number of artists, styles, techniques and subject matter, including etchings, wood engravings, lithographs and screenprints, presented in the exhibition capture the extraordinary upsurge during this six decade period as artists expanded their practice to explore the creative possibilities of printmaking. From the 1960s to the present day, printmaking underwent a marked elevation in status and transition from specialist medium, through to one widely adopted by some of the foremost names in contemporary art – including Tracey Emin whose polymer gravure etching Move (2016) is on show, along with Chris Ofili’s lithograph Afro Harlem Muses (2005).
From David Hockney's early etching Kaisarion with All His Beauty, made while a student at the Royal College of Art in 1961, to Lubaina Himid's poetic lithograph Birdsong Held Us Together, produced in response to the period of lockdown during 2020, the selection of prints on display exemplify the changes in British art during this period. The exhibition charts how Britain emerged from the postwar years in the early 1960s, navigated the social changes of the 1970s and 1980s, and saw the ascendency of contemporary British art from the 1990s to the present day.
On display are works by early printmaking pioneers including, Enid Marx,
John Piper, Stanley William Hayter and Julian Trevelyan, who were part of a generation of artists who sought to raise the standard of printmaking to new heights and democratise art by placing prints in publicly accessible places, such as pubs and schools.
Their mantle was adopted by a new generation of artists entering art colleges in the late 1950s and 1960s, including David Hockney, and most notably Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton who sought to explore the connection between art, technology and popular culture. Paolozzi and Hamilton found a natural expression in printmaking, in particular screenprinting, due to its ability to unify often incongruent visual sources within a single work. This is exemplified by Paolozzi’s As is When suite of twelve screenprints from 1965, which will be represented in the exhibition by Experience (1965). The series is widely recognised as a landmark in the history of modern printmaking and helped screenprinting gain acceptance as a fine art medium during a time when there was fierce debate over whether prints could be considered original artworks.
The exhibition also explores print studios, including Curwen Studio and Kelpra Studio, both of which opened in London in the late 1950s, alongside Edinburgh Printmakers which opened in 1967. It also features artworks produced at contemporary print studios working today, such as Counter Editions in Margate and Rabley Gallery, Marlborough. Significantly, for many artists included in the exhibition, creating prints involved working with skilled technicians at a print studio – a partnership that tested both the technical skills and creative imagination of the artist and the printer. Works on display that showcase this technical innovation and expertise include Richard Hamilton’s Adonis in Y-Fronts (1962-3). The work is the first print Hamilton made with the lead printmaker Chris Prater at Kelpra – it involved a complicated process of photo and hand-cut stencils along with Hamilton’s drawings on kodatrace.
The exhibition also highlights Pallant House Gallery’s remarkable collection of Scottish prints, including Self-portrait in Hospital I (1988) by John Bellany, the most influential Scottish artist of the postwar years and works by Joyce Cairns, the first woman President of Royal Scottish Academy. Also on show are works by Adrian Wiszniewski who was part of the New Glasgow Boys group which invigorated figurative painting in the 1980s. Figuration and abstraction features in equal measure in the exhibition including Bridget Riley’s Op Art screenprint, Untitled Screenprint (Blue) (1978), the intricate woodcut Sgraffito 2 (2015) by Rebecca Salter and Anish Kapoor’s etching with aquatint, Untitled (2002).
The majority of works featured in the exhibition are drawn from the Golder – Thompson Gift, the result of a unique twenty-year partnership between Pallant House Gallery and collectors Mark Golder and Brian Thompson. Both Thompson and Golder are teachers who have donated over 500 works to Pallant House Gallery for the enjoyment by the broadest possible audience.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated book Hockney to Himid: 60 Years of British Printmaking which will feature contributions from Louise Weller Head of Exhibitions at Pallant House Gallery, Simon Martin, Director of Pallant House gallery and an interview with Mark Golder and Brian Thompson. It will be published by Pallant House Gallery and distributed by Yale University Press.
