NEW YORK, NY.- International Print Center New York announces (Re)Print: Five Projects, an online exhibition centered on works by Mark Bradford, Cecily Brown, Glenn Brown, Enrique Chagoya, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. A dialogue between contemporary prints and the source material referenced, (Re)Print examines how artists revise, recontextualize, and personalize familiar imagery to elicit new thinking. Further, the pairings express the dynamic relationship between contemporary practice and the historical role that prints have played in image reproduction and dissemination, and in the shaping of history, culture, and beliefs. Originally organized for presentation in IPCNY’s exhibition space, this digital exhibition includes dynamic visuals, didactic text, artist quotes, and audio recordings of commentary by Jennifer Farrell, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “While COVID-19 has temporarily closed our space in Chelsea,” says Director Judy Hecker, “we continue our robust curatorial program through online presentations that provide expanded access.”
The ten etchings of First Flight (2015) by London-based Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, London) are sepia-colored portrait studies of black men wearing the feathered ruff collars that appear regularly in her paintings of fictional figures. Resisting easy definition, Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects are invented in the artist’s imagination, but extend her practice of critically engaging with the history of European portraiture conventions. Engravings by the 17th century Flemish artist Anthony Van Dyck embody the portrait tradition that Yiadom-Boake’s work pushes against.
Projects by Los Angeles-based Mark Bradford (b. 1961, Los Angeles) and San Francisco-based Enrique Chagoya (b. 1953, Mexico City) cite printed visual material that saturates our everyday life. In his 2012 series of etchings, Bradford transforms mass-produced merchant posters (brightly colored local advertisements that target a neighborhood’s lower-income residents) found around Los Angeles. Printed using recycled copper plates, the gritty, distressed etchings recontextualize merchant commerce and draw attention to social and economic systems that shape communities, and the issues of class, race, and gender that lie beneath. Chagoya’s nearly eight-foot accordion-folded codex El Regreso del Canibal Macrobiótico (The Return of the Macrobiotic Cannibal) (1998), derives from a wide range of reference material—from American comic books to Catholic iconography, and 17th century maps to pre-Columbian imagery—that the artist uses in surreal narrative confrontations. Combining woodcut, lithography, and chine collé on amate, the bark
paper used in pre-Columbian codices, this work typifies Chagoya’s incisive practice of “reverse anthropology,” rearranging cultural icons to intervene in collective memory and history-making.
New York-based Cecily Brown’s (b. 1969, London) intimate etchings from 2004 are inquiries into images by the print satirist and social critic William Hogarth, with whom Brown has engaged through a sustained practice of looking and studying. Brown transforms three of Hogarth’s engravings from his renowned series A Rake’s Progress (1735) and Four Prints of an Election (1755), reinterpreting their composition and linework to merge contemporary and historical contexts. In London-based Glenn Brown’s (b. 1966, Hexham, UK) Layered Portraits (After Lucian Freud) (2008), Brown critically engages the paradigm of artists making copies of old masters. He obfuscates etchings by the British 20th century portraitist Lucian Freud, altering and layering images that he scanned from exhibition catalogues and printed in dense composites of up to 16 images per print. Also on view, Freud’s Kai (1991–92) and Girl with Fuzzy Hair (2004), two works Brown appropriates, offer points of divergence.
