IFPDA Print Fair

Booth 200
Javits Center, New York
October 27 - 30, 2022

John Baldessari          General Idea
Huma Bhabha            Alfredo Jaar
Louise Bourgeois       Alex Katz
Eric Fischl                   James Turrell
Nicholas Galanin       Yukinori Yanagi

Peter Blum Edition is pleased to be participating in the IFPDA Print Fair. The presentation includes highlights from over four decades of the print publisher's editions, demonstrating the collaborative process between artist, printer, and publisher that result in singular multiples.

IFPDA Print Fair info is linked here.

"...Perhaps what's most interesting about this pair of prints is that Baldessari resorts to a piece of conventional Christian iconography for his depiction of Hell, while he offers a more personal vision of Heaven. The presence of the Coppo di Marcovaldo mosaic from the ceiling of the Baptistery in Florence is also noteworthy because it is one of the few non-photography-based images in Baldessari's oeuvre."

— Raphael Rubinstein on Heaven and Hell

“I took lots of black-and-white photographs, mostly of stalled construction sites and desert landscapes near the sea during a trip back to my native Pakistan. I then made enlargements and began drawing on them with pen or brush and India ink. I started out with feet, which in the context of the photographs looked enormous—as though they belonged to giants or were close-ups of monumental sculpture. But I also made drawings that showed figures in architectural settings or reclining in barren landscapes, as well as drawings that were more abstract.”

— Huma Bhabha on Reconstructions

“Three images come immediately to mind when I think of the foot in my work: the advancing feet of kouroi, a simple step that signified movement and a major advance for figurative sculpture; the painting of van Gogh’s shoes, which I’ve loved and tried to emulate since I was young; and a memory of a movie from years ago, in which one of the characters was blown up, leaving only a pair of sneakers.”

— Huma Bhabha

"First came the sweet face... and the mean cat face... then no face at all. Which will it be? No head at all! The arrows make her lose her head. This stage was chosen as the definitive one. The top looks like the section of a trunk... you see that it is a very fine tree.”

— Louise Bourgeois on Sainte Sébastienne

"My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama."

— Louise Bourgeois on Autobiographical

"This is a subject which is recurrent. There is a kind of disassociation between what the girl thinks... that is, what she wishes... and what she appears to be. What she wishes is to be a goody-goody... but the document reveals that her deeper mind is on something completely different! What you are and what you are not are intertwined.”

— Louise Bourgeois on Champfleurette, White Cat

"These images show Fischl's desire to take on art-historical models, while keeping his imagery firmly in a twentieth-century setting. One print of a nude recalls Courbet's Origin of the World, while another image brings to mind Velazquez's Rokeby Venus. Fischl clearly wants the viewer to make these connections and, with them, the concomitant comparisons. He cares less about  how his own art will fare in such comparison than about having the freedom to reference specific art-historical models, simultaneously making the point that contemporary life is every bit as 'classical' as that of any other period."

— Vincent Katz on Floating Islands

“Fischl was dissatisfied with a painting and painted a white shape in it, which he then realized was a bed. ‘I never understood it, but I knew it was done,’ he has said. ‘Then years later that bed started to appear and reappear until its presence became clarified to me.’ The bed image would play a crucial role in Fischl's mature work, which took the dysfunctionality of American suburban life as its primary context.”

— Vincent Katz on Eric Fischl

“In the monotypes, my hand as much as Tlingit culture’s history shapes the representation. Each monotype bears the imprint of a story of its creation, not as myth, but as lived experience and through memory—the marks showing the spontaneity of a drawing with the enduring qualities of a print."

— Nicholas Galanin on his monotypes

"The imagery is central to Tlingit life and references and mimics visual movements of a customary aesthetic. However, my contemporary interpretation forms a creative continuum that combines past with present.”

— Nicholas Galanin on his monotypes

"Fear Management was issued at a crucial point, when General Idea turned nearly wholly to AIDS as a subject. One cannot help but read the prints as shifting between two emotional tones, one portentous and the other still playful...The prints convey the sense that the artists are taking a vacation from the reality at hand, retrospectively surveying two decades of imagery but hovering on the verge of the unavoidable bad news."

— Faye Hirsch on Fear Management

"Nelson Mandela is released from prison, after 28 years of brutal treatment by the apartheid regime. The images of his release, broadcast live around the world, show a man squinting into the light as if blinded. More than half of Mandela's sentence was spent on Robben Island, a windswept rock surrounded by the treacherous seas of the Cape of Good Hope. Only seven miles off Cape Town, the island had been used as a maximum security prison for 'non-white' men since 1959. Mandela later said that Robben Island was 'intended to cripple us so that we should never again have the strength and courage to pursue our ideals.'..."

— David Levi Strauss for The Sound of Silence

"But the more one looks at his block prints the more their commonality with his painting is evident. He avoids transparency in them, just as he never uses glazes in his canvases. Flat expanses of tone and balances of positive with void are recurrent in his paintings too, along with a tendency to simplification and summation of movement and form. Many of his procedures as an artist have a hands-on physicality not unlike that of relief print."

— Merlin James on Katz's block prints

"Printed works are of crucial importance within Katz’s oeuvre. It is the medium in which he reproduces, reflects, and reduces his motifs in further stages, using mainly ideas from his paintings and cut-outs."

— Klaus Albrecht Schroder on Katz's prints

"I suddenly had this intense desire, this urge to cut into wood or linoleum, but I didn't have any blocks or tools. So, I went to the local supply store in Camden [Maine] where I bought the kind of print kit intended for the beginner or the sixth-grade art class student who wants to learn how to cut a linoleum block. I went to work fast and furiously and couldn't stop until I had used up all the blocks."

— Alex Katz on Landscapes

"The print Fumarole is a spectacular black-and-white re-creation of storm-like cosmic activity occurring in the sky above the dark silhouette of the top of Roden Crater. Turrell believes his ideas about mapping relate to set theory. He likens what he did this group of prints to putting thought on a place."

— Phyllis Tuchman on Mapping Spaces

“The Chamber sheets contrast a mysterious, intriguing effects created by light with chartlike renderings of corridors and chambers from quadrants of Roden Crater. One side deals with experience; the other offers a ‘map’ that can guide you to that state.”

— Phyllis Tuchman on Mapping Spaces

“The boundaries that ants cannot recognize – their inability is intimated by densely drawn red lines that trace their repeated movements toward the metal bars – are not only physical borders but also a metaphor for the 'imaginary boundaries' that regulate human behavior. Therein, the ants’ predicament parallels the existential condition of humans.”

— Reiko Tomii on Wandering Position