Fen Ditton Gallery are delighted to announce a major new print show to launch their 2022 exhibition season celebrating some of the most significant artistic collaborations of Cambridge master printmaker Kip Gresham.
Gresham (b. 1951, Cambridge) studied art at Manchester and Newcastle colleges of art before establishing his first print studio in Manchester in 1975. He has gone on to become one of the most influential printmakers of his generation and was previously director and master printer at both Curwen Chilford Prints (1989-1994) and Gresham studio (1994-2001). He established The Print Studio, Cambridge in 2002.
‘The Language of Abstraction’ brings together works by important modern and contemporary painters and sculptors, selected in conversation with Gresham, as a way of highlighting the rich conceptual and visual language of abstract art – a language of colour, form and light - and the potential of the print medium (above all the medium of screenprint) to deepen understanding of this language. As one exhibitor, American sculptor, Willard Boepple says:
‘Layering is key here…Kip opened up a whole world for me by layering thin colours, building forms with layer upon layer of translucent colours that mixed and blended like sorcery…building the form with colour’.
Some of the exhibited artists represented had long, active relationships to the print medium with different collaborators, such as Gillian Ayres and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Others such as sculptor Nigel Hall and painter Michael Brick developed a voice in print particularly through their work with Gresham. Each artist however is recognised for their sustained exploration of the language of abstraction in both two and three dimensions. As Kip Gresham comments:
‘the image is what counts: not how, why, when it was made. The object, its it-ness, its this-ness, its particularity are the qualities and realities that will make it command attention.’
Exhibitors include:
Gillian Ayres CBE RA(1930-2018); Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE (1912-2004); Willard Boepple (b.1945, USA); Michael Brick (1946-2014); Bob Edgson (b. 1945); Nigel Hall RA (b.1943); Kim Lim (1936-1997); Jeff Lowe (b.1952); John McLean (1939-2019); Mali Morris (b.1945)
