LONDON.- Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Richard Serra and Kiki Smith, four internationally renowned sculptors, each of whom have made iconic works. Less well known, though equally regarded is their printmaking.

Sculpture and printmaking have always had an affinity, and as Nancy Campbell writes in her introduction to the show, `it’s bewitching when a sculptor brings their sensibility for space to the constraints of a single plane, and unafraid of technical experiment, explore different means of making marks’. This show brings together selected prints by the four artists, each making their unique mark in print.

Anish Kapoor’s series Shadows and Horizon Shadows present bands of light and dark out of which vibrate rich fields of colour; aquamarine, scarlet, magenta, cobalt blue. The colours recall the mountains of vivid powdered pigment in Kapoor’ sculpture. Louise Bourgeois’s Sainte Sebastienne reworks the Christian martyr as a strong female figure typifying her punning treatment of gender in some of her sculptures. Bourgeois employed fabric in many of her sculptures, recalling her mothers work restoring tapestries, and she went on to introduce fabric into many of her graphic works, including the 36 part set The Fragile. Serra’s dense black ink etchings appear as if he has inked the faces of his sculptures and laid them onto the paper. And, Kiki Smith’s interest in body politics, and the relationship between human anatomy and its decay, and the natural world are expressed in her prints. Smith focuses on fleeting external appearances, and what she calls `skin as an envelope’.

An illustrated catalogue with text by Nancy Campbell will be available. Nancy Campbell is a poet and editor of Printmaking Today, and she writes widely on graphic art. Her poetry collection Disko Bay is published by Enitharmon Press.