SAN FRANCISCO, CA: Crown Point Press announces Landscape: Urban & Rural, a winter group exhibition featuring a selection of prints that were published by the press between 1987 and 2014. The exhibition includes woodcuts and etchings by sixteen artists who have brought fresh perspectives through subject matter and stylistic approach to the traditional genre of landscape. As Swedish artist Jockum Nordström said while in the Crown Point studio, “When I make the prints, when I see different plates come to the paper—I see images in a way that I have never done before. It is a new way of seeing.” Landscape: Urban & Rural is on view February 9 to April 1, 2017.
The prints in the exhibition are primarily representational and include urban and rural images of city billboards, shop windows, misty waterfalls, and dramatic cliffs to name a few. San Francisco artist Robert Bechtle precisely rendered a row of houses in the city’s Potrero Hill neighborhood in Three Houses on Pennsylvania Avenue (2011). He was able to achieve his quintessential style of photorealism through the soft ground technique and its crayon-like line.
Jockum Nordström simultaneously evokes a sense of nostalgia and unfamiliarity in Back to the Land (2008), which features three peculiar characters in a rural scene of underbrush, trees, and cloud formations. He used paper cut-outs of faces, torsos, and shapes on a prepared soft ground plate to build the narrative. He then created gentle washes of blue sky and weathered marks using the sugar lift and spit bite aquatint techniques.
New York-based artist Pat Steir loosely rendered only the essential properties of the landscape Mountain in Rain (2012) by using the direct gravure technique. She abstractly painted the mountains on a sheet of transparent Mylar, folding the Mylar onto itself to create an inkblot impression on both sides. She then splattered raindrops on a separate sheet of Mylar. Each image was transferred onto its own copperplate through a light-sensitive, gelatin ground, etched with acid, and inked individually in sage green and blue.
Also on exhibition are prints by Mamma Andersson, Darren Almond, William Brice, Peter Doig, April Gornik, Yvonne Jacquette, Tom Marioni, David Nash, Joan Nelson, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Wayne Thiebaud, and William T. Wiley.
Landscape: Urban & Rural demonstrates a variety of interpretations to the genre where the artist’s prints are as varied as their approaches to making art. The exhibition is on display in the Crown Point Gallery at 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, February 9 – April 1, 2017. On view concurrently is Green by Richard Diebenkorn: The Story of a Print, an exhibition of four working proofs for the artist’s seminal Green (1986) print. The gallery hours are Monday 10-5 and Tuesday through Saturday 10-6.
