RARE PRINTS

Rare Prints brings together woodcuts, silkscreens and lithographs as well as graphic works that combine different printing techniques. The exhibited works have been shown in public institutions like the New York Whitney Museum of American Art and the London Royal Academy of Arts, but for the most part have only rarely been presented in Germany. Starting with prints by pioneering American artists of the post-war era, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Cy Twombly, the exhibition also includes works of contemporary British artists Damien Hirst and Emma Stibbon.

Roy Lichtenstein’s work »IMPERFECT 67“ x 79 7/8“« subverts the ideal geometrical balance with asymmetric lines and exuberant triangular shapes: the imperfect, sprawling pictorial space undermines the expectation of a seemingly harmonious ideal of abstraction.

In Andy Warhol’s screen print »Electric Chair« the artist’s personal ›signature‹ seems to disappear. Warhol expresses the overpowering attraction of fear and death, which already seems to herald our age of digital and social media. Cy Twombly’s graphic series, on the other hand, stems from the associative field of powerful, highly individual ciphers, a radically free form of signs consisting solely of ciphers and writing. Warhol’s and Twombly’s works embody extraordinary forms of expression in printmaking, which stand in the most extreme contrast to one another.

In its fourteen-part cycle »The Stations of the Cross« Damien Hirst combines Christ’s Way with the promise of salvation of modern medicine, to confront religion and science with one another in striking images. Emma Stibbon’s four part »Caldera Overlook«, which was inspired by Japanese prints, lets light intrude into the darkness of the endangered Rainforest in the Hawaii national park, whose eerie beauty is the centre of this depiction.

Rare Prints is the first exhibition of Bastian Gallery, which is exclusively dedicated to the medium of printmaking. It follows the solo exhibitions of the gallery such as Cy Twombly’s »Natural History« print cycle (2019), Picasso’s complete »Suite Vollard« (2014) and Donald Judd’s woodcuts (2012)

Roy Lichtenstein, Imperfect 67ʺ x 79 7⁄8ʺ, 1988 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, Courtesy Galerie Bastian, Berlin

Link to virtual exhibition view