Press Release
Marlborough Graphics New York is thrilled to participate in the 30th edition of the IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair in New York. The IFPDA Print Fair is the largest international art fair dedicated to prints and printmaking, spanning periods and styles from old masters to contemporary. Marlborough's presentation brings together works by Laura Anderson Barbata, Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, Benedict Scheuer, Liorah Tchiprout and Zao Wou-Ki.
Unique prints on cloth and complete portfolio sets by Louise Bourgeois will be on view, highlighting the artist’s lifelong themes of childhood, motherhood, familial identity, and human sexuality. Bourgeois says of printmaking, “the whole history of the creative process is there. In painting or in sculpture it would be gone”. After focusing on her sculpture for nearly forty years, printmaking became a daily activity for Louise Bourgeois from the 1980s until her death in 2010. Included in the presentation will be the complete portfolio "What is the Shape of this Problem?" (1999). Compiled of text taken from her diary entries, spanning some forty years. The images are based on drawings created by the artist in the 1990's.
While he may be best known as a painter, prints play a critical role in Lucian Freud’s practice. After a 34-year hiatus, he returned to printmaking in the early 1980s. The marks and techniques he employed during the etching process were a natural progression from his work as a draughtsman. Freud’s approach to printmaking was informed by his painting; by placing the etching plate upright on an easel, he was able to meticulously work from life. Always working directly from his models and demarcating their forms through meticulous networks of finely etched lines. Unsettling and unyielding, these portraits contain a remarkable honesty and an awkwardness that adds to the psychological tension.
Chinese-born French artist Zao Wou-Ki worked extensively in a variety of mediums, including watercolor, ink, and printmaking across a five-decade practice. Zao is recognized for his nonrepresentational paintings that blended Eastern and Western modes of art making. ‘Everybody is bound by a tradition. I am bound by two,’ the artist once reflected. Brushstrokes—whether in color or black ink—become abstract image fields in which foreground and background are in constant flux. Each conveys an abstract visual event that is emotionally charged, turbulent in structure and striking in impact. Zao created his own nonrepresentational artistic language that transcends identifiable associations with symbols in writing and the natural world.
Coinciding with the artists current solo exhibition at Marlborough New York, Singing Leaf, a selection of monotypes by Laura Anderson Barbata will be on view. Born in 1958 in Mexico City, Laura Anderson Barbata is a transdisciplinary artist, performer, writer, and educator who lives and works between New York and Mexico City. Since the early-1990s, Anderson Barbara has initiated art-centered projects in the United States, the Venezuelan Amazon, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, and Norway which emphasize reciprocity, shared knowledge, and decolonial thinking.
For the first time, Marlborough Graphics New York is pleased to present a selection of monotypes by Liorah Tchiprout. Tchiprout's work explores girlhood, belonging, and the theatrical, underpinned by a rigorous practice of drawing. Her work is informed by a legacy of Yiddish theatre and literature, with writers such as Rachel Korn, Miriam Karpilove and Issac Bashevis Singer sited as major influences. She builds physical puppet characters to construct her own pantheon from which to draw images.
Recent monoprints by Benedict Scheuer will be included in the exhibition. Scheuer practices a quiet spirituality—felt while sitting on his porch, tending his dahlias, and working in the studio. Within this practice, drawing and painting are instruments of devotion, connecting the body to that which exists outside of it. Scheuer will have a solo exhibition at Marlborough New York in November 2023.