VIENNA.- Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst. The Revolution in Printmaking is part two in the grand trio of print-themed exhibitions that the ALBERTINA Museum is showing this year. Among these, this presentation at ALBERTINA MODERN is of a special kind: printmaking post 1960 differs radically from the printed graphics of the previous five centuries.

The prints in the ALBERTINA Museum’s Graphic Art Collection mirror the various tendencies of art’s development internationally in light of outstanding examples. It is thus that American pop and minimal art as practiced by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Donald Judd enjoy representation on an equal footing with artists from the German- speaking region such as Georg Basilitz, Jörg Immendorf, Anselm Kiefer, and Franz Gertsch. The collection also extends forward in time to encompass younger artists like Christiane Baumgartner and Michaela Konrad. In this context, novel applications of traditional techniques such as woodcut receive every bit as much attention as does innovative work born of the possibilities revealed by expanded approaches to printmaking.

The post-1960 revolution was characterized by three important elements in particular: the first is the principle of seriality and repetition, which typifies the oeuvres of Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and Donald Judd.

The monumentalization of printed graphics as seen in works by artists ranging from Anselm Kiefer and Franz Gertsch to Georg Basilitz and on to Christiane Baumgartner as well as Gert and Uwe Tobias likewise represents a significant innovation.

And finally, the newly adopted technique of screenprinting in a certain sense paved the way for these developments. Reality—constantly reproduced and repeated in magazines and daily newspapers—was now presented in the form of artworks. Works of this type were no longer created according to models or through real-life observation of nature, but instead arose via direct engagement with reality-as-already-photographed. The emulation of reality was thus replaced with printed copies of reality. Reality had long since disappeared from art on account of art’s departure from the principle of “emulating nature.” The mid-20th century, however, witnessed its sudden reappearance in pop art—albeit in a technically mediated way.

Screenprinting

Andy Warhol, through his employment of screenprinting for serial production, played a central role in the development of printmaking during the 20th century’s second half. With an eye to industrial methods, his intent was to use screenprinting to produce artworks like products on a modern shop floor. Industrially produced mass-market items such as cans of Campbell’s Soup—to be found in practically every household—were reproduced in a commensurately mechanized manner, with the artist disappearing in the process and becoming just as anonymous as any industrial worker. And much like in factory work, the new artworks were cranked out as if on a production line. It was in this light that Warhol named his studio The Factory.

The Monumentalization of Printed Graphics
Today’s contemporary artists have come to work in gigantic formats as a matter of course— an approach that only became established over the past several decades following its initial spread from New York after World War II. Many artists aim to provide their works with space to occupy and spread across, using these works’ large sizes to channel the viewer’s gaze in a different way and lend their art itself an entirely new appearance. Large-scale artworks entail a change in perception on the part of their audience—especially in light of how large contemporary works were initially presented in smaller spaces in order that their viewers might engage thoroughly with them from aesthetic and moral standpoints.

The Principle of Seriality

The 1960s saw repetition elevated to the status of an artistic principle. It was in this vein, for instance, that Warhol created his widely known portrait series showing famous personalities, works that are captivating for their extraordinary cosmos of colors: in garish chromatic combinations and brashly contrasting hues, he varied these motifs in ever-new sequences. Warhol made a theme of the 1960s debate on the abolition of capital punishment in his series Electric Chair. He also produced portraits of China’s controversial dictator Mao Tse-tung, albeit in bright neon colors that form a contrast with the attendant dark themes.

The ALBERTINA Museum, with its extensive holdings and exceptional collecting history, is capable of retracing the past five centuries and especially the past five decades like virtually no other collection anywhere in the world.

Exhibition

Alongside the newfound reproducibility of art, the 15th-century innovation of printmaking’s most revolutionary aspect – as compared with medieval painting – was the high degree of abstraction inherent in the pure black-and-white contrasts of the woodcuts, copperplate engravings, and etchings that emerged. Over the five centuries that followed, printed graphics were to remain largely devoid of color as well as confined to small formats due to paper manufacturing’s technical limitations.

The 1960s advent of pop art and minimalism, however, went hand-in-hand with radical changes in the appearance of printed graphics as a whole. The invention of new synthetic colored inks enabled artists – foremost among them Warhol, Rauschenberg, Dine, and Katz – to employ the same color palettes in their prints that they did in their paintings. That same decade also saw advances in paper manufacturing that enabled the production of larger formats than before.

It is thus that prints kept pace with the newest large-format painted output. From the 1960s onward, monumental formats came to characterize the printed works of pop art and minimalism’s most important representatives as well as graphic prints by the great German individualists Kiefer, Baselitz, and Immendorff along with those of Austria’s Hermann Nitsch and the translucent woodcuts of Swiss artist Franz Gertsch.

In terms of printmaking processes, the time-honored techniques of woodcut and etching along with the 19th-century invention of lithography were joined post World War II by screenprinting – with which it became possible for the first time to reproduce photographs, newspaper and magazine pictures, cheaply done advertisements, and comics in an artistic manner. Reality was no longer drawn positioned in front of the motif; instead, it became far more common for images already disseminated by the mass media to serve as printed graphics’ source material.

The most novel 1960s development was the principal of motifs’ serialization. It was not a single portrait of the Great Chairman Mao, but rather ten Maos; not an isolated picture of an electric chair, but ten “Electric Chairs” that came together to form the totality of a serial image, an approach that typifies not just pop art but also the minimalism of a Donald Judd or a James Turrell.

The monumentalization of artistic prints, the principle of seriality, and the new, vivid colorfulness of printed works opened an entirely new chapter in the altogether 600-year history of printmaking – a chapter on which this presentation, the second part of the Albertina Museum’s major spring exhibition, sheds light with its 80 major works by artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst.

The first part, which extends from Dürer to Munch and on to Miró, is being held simul- taneously at the Albertina Museum.

News of the World

In his art, Robert Rauschenberg came to terms with political developments and events playing out in his immediate present: civil rights protests in the United States, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War. Rauschenberg’s series Soviet/American Array deals with the conflict-ridden relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States as the 1980s drew to a close. For these works, Rauschenberg mixed his own snapshots of the metropolises of New York and Moscow with photographic images from the media. On the basis of these combinations, he developed contemporary historical documents whose imagery includes distinctive architectures—such as the Neoclassical buildings typical of Moscow and the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center, the latter of which were destroyed in 2001. In doing so, he employed the photogravure process—etching his motifs on a copper plate, which he then used to create a paper print.

Fetishes of Childhood

Jim Dine’s childhood memories figure significantly into his work as an artist. One motivic pillar of Dine’s oeuvre consists in tools such as hammers, saws, and pliers, with which the artist became acquainted quite early on in his grandfather’s workshop—a formative place for him—and of which he is a passionate collector. Tools like these provide the titles for works such as those in the series Tool Box. Here, Dine brings together individual elements of his screenprints in the manner of a collage. Alongside tools, which feature as omnipresent motifs, the individual works also contain other details that evoke more typical childhood- themed associations—including appearances by characters like Donald Duck.

Eerie Childhood

Although Auguste Kronheim did not belong to any of the feminist groups active during the 1970s, she did take quite an intense artistic interest in gender clichés and women’s role in society. Kronheim’s works show cruelties and obscenities in a picture-book-like manner that owes much to traditional woodcut techniques. In many of her individual works on paper, the artist catalogs society’s expectations of a good wife, mother, cook, and homemaker: she should be compassionate, helpful, conscientious, and thrifty. In all of her groups of works, Auguste Kronheim depicts the vulnerability of mother and child in a living environment shaped by religious and bourgeois moral values and characterized by hypocrisy.

Pop: The Serial Attitude

With his strategic employment of screenprinting to produce works in series, Warhol assumed a central role in printed graphics’ 20th-century development. The intent was to mechanize the process of producing artworks’ with an eye to industrial methods. The resulting ease and faster tempo of production contributed to a deliberately promoted commercialization of art that can also be seen in its content, which takes its cues from pop culture. The artist became a machine, with automated repetition as a guiding principle. It was in this vein that Warhol created his widely known series showing portraits of famous personalities, series that are impressive for their extraordinary chromatic cosmos: in garish color combinations and brashly contrasting hues, he varied these motifs in ever-new sequences. Warhol produced portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, but also of the controversial Chinese dictator Mao Tse-tung.

Commercialization of the World




No other name is so universally associated with the notion of “pop” as is that of Andy Warhol. His oeuvre exemplifies a species of art that borrows its motifs from the realm of everyday experience, from the world of products seen in advertising and the media, and from magazine and newspaper journalism’s flood of images. As a reflection of modern consumer society, his output is virtually unparalleled. The early 1960s witnessed Warhol’s discovery and adoption of screenprinting techniques, which he used to transform such everyday objects as cans of Campell’s Soup into glamorous representatives of a shiny product aesthetic that, as such, needed to be read anew. In a motivic sense, it was a sharp turn towards the banal. Radical here is not only the artist’s concentration on the colors red and white, but also his striking reduction of these images to their subjects – which cease to stand for anything but themselves and whose constant repetition would seem to rob them of all meaning. In actual fact, however, the repetition, permutation, and serial depiction effected by such works ultimately resulted not in meaninglessness but in icons – as which the objects and celebrities shown by Warhol came to enjoy even greater fame and significance.

On the Emotions of Things

Jim Dine’s figurative pictorial motifs such as bathrobes, hearts, and tools can be understood above all as being representative of the artist—as a vocabulary of his emotions, as Dine himself explains. The artist’s employment of and elaboration upon various printing processes bears witness to his fascination with graphic printing techniques in general. He hence uses chainsaws to cut grooves in the printing block, upon which he mounts previously discarded prints in a collage-like manner. Dine is also fond of playing with printing plates, on which one can continue working step-by-step—transforming them by way of a progressively advancing process.

Hard-Edge

Experimentierfreudig steigert Alex Katz durch das Übereinanderdrucken durchscheinender Farbschichten die Luminosität der Farben. Er übernimmt Jackson Pollocks All-over und die durch scharfe Kanten voneinander getrennten Farbflächen des Color Field Painting und Hard-Edge. In seinen herangezoomten überlebensgroßen Porträtköpfen und der Betonung des Modischen setzt er sich mit dem Close-up der Werbung, des Films und Fernsehens auseinander, will Aufmerksamkeit in einer von Bildern beherrschten Welt erwirken.

It was in an enthusiastically experimental vein that Alex Katz set about heightening the luminosity of his colors by printing translucent chromatic layers one atop the other. In doing so, he borrowed Jackson Pollock’s all-over concept as well as the sharply delineated chromatic surfaces of color field painting and hard-edge painting. His zoomed-in, larger-than-life portrait heads and his emphasis on elements of fashion reference the close-up shots seen in advertising, in film, and on television, seeking to attract attention in a world where images reign supreme.

Bigger than life

Hyperrealistic portraits based on close-up photographs characterize Chuck Close’s oeuvre. His central theme is the human face. Extreme proximity, frontal positioning, and room-filling presence—owed above all to tight framing—lend these likenesses a high degree of psychological depth. The artist would often build his overall composition out of numerous small units, in part geometrically arranged, whose interplay gives rise to a naturalistic portrait that functions as a unified whole geared to being viewed from a distance. It is a game of perspectives: exactly what viewers perceive changes in accordance with the distance from the artwork that they assume.

Comics: Low Art to High Art

Roy Lichtenstein, much like Andy Warhol, took the everyday world as his central theme, with the advertising industry and mass media thus becoming significant points of reference in his art. It is in this context that one can view his use of grid-like dot patterns known as Ben Day dots, whose presence characterizes the lion’s share of his work. These dots imitate the appearance of cheap offset printing, which was used for the quick, inexpensive, and large- volume production of regular publications and posters as well as for producing comic books. Lichtenstein appropriated the aesthetics of such media: alongside Ben Day dots, dark lines and simple contours as well as clearly delineated, saturated, monochromatic surfaces came to define his style. In adapting the visual world of comics, the artist rendered the boundaries between high art and low art successively blurrier.

Kiki Smith and Magic

Kiki Smith is famous for her cross-media and interdisciplinary approach. The artist conjures up a fragile, feminine, and often autobiographically connoted universe that she sets against art’s male-dominated history. Smith critically scrutinizes traditional female roles and makes a theme of women’s self-image and perception of their own bodies. In her series Banshee Pearls, several self-portraits – some of them distorted and fearsome – are rendered at various scales and combined with illustrations of various masks. Smith started from photographs and photocopies of her own face to produce lithographic plates, with which she then made both negative and positive prints. The artist used photographs from her childhood, prints made from her own hair, and images of her teeth. The banshees in this series’ title are a direct reference to the female spirits of Gaelic folklore.

The Last Supper

As a reaction to the events of World War II and Austria’s long-repressed political role in connection therewith, the 1960s saw the rise of Viennese Actionism. Hermann Nitsch, one of this movement’s foremost protagonists, conceived his actions – to which he gave the collective name Theater of Orgies and Mysteries – as total works of art that brought together the most diverse disciplines such as painting, music, text, and stage scenery. In doing so, the artist also integrated liturgical elements – resulting in a “theater” reminiscent of sacrificial rituals. These actions were intended to overcome art’s limitations in an ecstatic and excessive way, engendering a union between art and life. Nitsch’s printed graphics must be viewed within the context of his Theater of Orgies and Mysteries. It was already as part of his professional training that the artist had received instruction in the basic printing techniques, which he began using more frequently as well as refining and expanding in 1983. Due to the strict concept followed by his printing process, which employed multiple plates as well as a canvas borrowed from an action, some of Nitsch’s graphics can be viewed as one-of-a-kind creations – as is the case with works like The Last Supper and Entombment.

The Burden of the Past

Anselm Kiefer experiments with the most varied techniques, and his work is viewed together with that of Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, and Jörg Immendorff as central to the comeback of woodcut in the early 1980s. These contemporary artists, members of a fatherless postwar generation, applied themselves to this history-steeped technique in full awareness of its import. In the history of German art, woodcut enjoys particular pride of place – extending from the seminal early Renaissance prints of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach onto the magnificent works of German Expressionism at the dawn of the 20th century.

Minimal: The Serial Attitude

The principle of serialism and proceeding in accordance with a predetermined concept are of no small importance in the work of minimalist artists. In this regard, it is especially printed graphics that enjoy central significance. The involved technical processes and inherent possibilities virtually predestined this art form for serial production according to plans laid down in advance as well as for the easy replication of a given geometrically designed pictorial composition. It was no longer the gestural or expressive that was in focus, but rather the execution of a structural concept meticulously worked out ahead of time. The subjective is suppressed, here: calculation replaces emotion, with strict systems of arrangement replacing spontaneity and individual artistic expressivity. The serial mode of work highlights associations between minimal and pop art, associations that are themselves owed not least to the fact that, for quite some time, artists of both persuasions frequently showed their works together – united in their anti-subjectivist stance and in their rejection of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism.

The Discovery of Slowness

Christiane Baumgartner is the foremost printmaker among the artists of the New Leipzig School, whose new manner of virtuosic artisanship assumed a dominant role in art for a full decade following the turn of the millennium. A recurrent theme in her works is the divergence between velocity and motionlessness. In the videos that serve Baumgartner as her starting point, every second that elapses consists of 25 individual frames. The artist translates the digital data from these still images into parallel lines that she then carves into wood by way of a painstaking process. The patterns of horizontal lines so characteristic of her works thus arise from the technical aspects of transforming the initial material into a finished relief print. Precisely these horizontal lines make her printed graphics appear to shimmer – with the scenes they show frozen in time but seemingly set in motion once more.

The Pointillistic Woodcut

Franz Gertsch, the postwar period’s most famous Swiss artist and a central representative of photorealism, turned to woodcut during the mid-1980s. He based his images on his own modest snapshots. The intent here was to capture the ephemerality of the sixtieth-of-a- second shown in each photograph as well as to preserve the photographs as such. To this end, Gertsch developed a technique that involved poking countless small points into the wood – points that came out white on the printed paper with only the unworked areas transferring ink. This practice of pointillistic light-drawing decisively influences the appearance of the pictorial motifs, slides of which Gertsch projected onto the wood before beginning his work. With his innovative approach, the artist succeeded in coaxing entirely new expressive possibilities out of traditional woodcut technique. In his landscape woodcuts, the photographed motifs are transformed into romantically tinged images of nature that brim over with poetry, opening our gaze to the universal and to the beauty of the seemingly insignificant.

Prostheses of the Bourgeois

Portraits by the Biedermeier-era artist Josef Kriehuber served Markus Schinwald as templates for these carbon prints. The artist purchased several of Kriehuber’s lithographs, scanned them, and then continued his work on the computer. He then proceeded to adapt, shift, or double individual details – spectacle frames, nose coverings, mysterious metal apparatuses – thereafter inserting them seamlessly into Kriehuber’s portraits as prostheses. Schinwald’s interest in prostheses as such is rooted in the search for deficits of the human body, deficits that prosthetic devices might help to ameliorate. His works are bemusing and unsettling for the deviations from the norm that they consistently show. Schinwald makes a theme of human beings in all of their insufficiencies – caught between simultaneous efforts at self- expression and self-discipline while subject to societal compulsions and conventions.

The Future of the Past

Present prognoses for the future as well as past predictions concerning our present are the content of Michaela Konrad’s series CAN THIS BE TOMORROW? Stylistically, the artist orients herself toward the “golden age” of comic books in the United States between the 1930s and the 1950s – an era that saw such publications go mainstream. Her works’ sensationalist aesthetics help her stories to seem like the wild fantasies of a comic book author from back then while also visibly bringing home their present-day currency. A further source of inspiration on which the artist draws in her renderings of the future with help from the past is Aldous Huxley’s classic 1932 novel Brave New World – which was far ahead of its time in describing the futuristic “utopia” of a totalitarian social power structure, omnipresent surveillance, and the state-mandated optimization of human beings. It is in this vein that Konrad presents real-world occurrences and now-realistic options as ostensible speculations of science fiction once upon a time. Taking advantage of today’s technological possibilities, Michaela Konrad has now expanded upon her various series by enabling motifs from her printed graphics to be experienced as augmented reality via the Artvive app.

Stardust

The oeuvre of Jack Pierson is characterized by a deeply personal perspective on motifs typical of the United States. These include portrayals of the cult of stardom – portrayals that are, however, consistently accompanied by undertones both nostalgic and socially critical. Rather than glorify the seductive ideal of the American Dream, Pierson casts his gaze on its dark side. In his album-like portfolio Twilight, silkscreened icons from the Golden Age of Hollywood are pasted in opposite assemblages of vintage lettering that form pithy and in part cynical headings. Juxtaposed with musical star Jane Powell’s dreamy facial expression, for example, one sees the words “My Sin.” Also present in this work are further glamorous personalities such as Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, and Rock Hudson.

The Last Supper

In this work, Damien Hirst parodies the typical packaging designs of pharmaceutical products. Variations on his own name, complete with logos, stand in for the producing drug companies. The medicines’ brand names are replaced by the names of typical British dishes and transformed into trademarks by symbols like ® and ™. Hirst takes up multiple themes, here. For one thing, he points out how industrially produced food products frequently contain hazardous ingredients. Conversely, his designs also reflect the way in which products of large pharmaceutical conglomerates are produced and sold just like any other brand-name items. In this, the artist questions the matter-of-fact way in which we now consume medicines and nutritional supplements in hopes that daily pill-popping could somehow compensate for a self-destructive lifestyle. Hirst’s title refers to the biblical scene in which Jesus shares a final evening meal with his twelve disciples prior to being crucified. Jesus himself is accorded the – quite possibly hallucinogenic – mushroom.

Peter Kogler and the Digitization of Signs

Alongside his interest in the serial principle as found in minimal art, Peter Kogler’s fascination with the film architectures of expressionism as well as utopian architectures shine through clearly in his oeuvre. Kogler’s works are typified by repetitive motifs arranged in systems of patterns bereft of a center or hierarchy. The late 1980s saw Kogler begin generating models for his pictures on an Amiga PC and then inkjet-printing modified image codes generated from multiple data streams on rolls of paper, wallpaper, and panels of synthetic fabric. In doing so, he gradually developed an ornamental visual language of a somewhat architectural character that features a limited number of basic elements such as ants, brains, tubes, globes, and grids. This computer-generated alphabet serves Kogler as a basis for his installative works, whose creative and steady undulations appear on walls, ceilings, and floors in museums and galleries as well as in the public realm. They exist as an all-over visual experience for the viewer but also as an optical game situated somewhere between disorienting labyrinth and decorative ornamentation.