Pressing the Boundaries of Printmaking: Five Decades of Mixographia

Based in Downtown Los Angeles, Mixografia occupies a singular place in the history of contemporary printmaking.

Luis and Lea Remba founded the studio in Mexico City as a gathering space for artists, built on serious experimentation rather than production for its own sake.

In 1973, Rufino Tamayo came to the workshop wanting his prints to carry the texture and physical weight of his paintings.

Luis responded by inventing a new process, one capable of registering topography and relief alongside form and color. No commercial paper could withstand the demands of it, so the Rembas’ son, Shaye, designed and built custom papermaking machinery to meet the challenge. The studio took its name from the medium it had created: Mixografia.

After a celebrated 1984 exhibition at UCLA’s Wright Art Gallery, the Rembas opened a second studio in Los Angeles. Shaye Remba still directs it today, continuing a practice built on three generations of technical mastery and artistic partnership.

The process begins with an artist’s original model: a maquette, a drawing, an object, a mark. From it, a three-dimensional plate is cast. Handmade cotton paper is pressed into the inked surface under significant pressure, absorbing pigment while conforming to every contour and indentation the plate carries. The result is a print with body, an object that does not reproduce an image so much as receive one. Paper becomes witness. Relief becomes language. Mixografia’s master printers work not as technicians but as true partners, translating an artist’s vision into something tactile and dimensional.

4

Five decades of Mixografia’s history reads less like the story of one workshop than a map of contemporary art itself. Pressing the Boundaries of Printmaking brings together artists who share almost nothing except this: each arrived in Downtown Los Angeles with a vision the printed page could not yet hold, and left with something new.

John Baldessari, a founding figure of West Coast Conceptualism, used the studio’s dimensional capacity to give his flattened, faceless figures real physical presence.

Louise Bourgeois, working in a register of memory and the body, found in Mixografia a way to carry the coiled, handmade intimacy of thread and wire into paper and ink. Ed Ruscha, chronicler of American vernacular, pressed weathered signage and windblown grass into surfaces that read as much as they are seen. Helen Frankenthaler used the process to hold the same fields of color and gesture that defined her canvases.

Manolo Valdes, Dario Escobar, and Jacob Hashimoto extend that range further, bringing Spanish figuration, object-based Latin American practice, and a distinctly contemporary approach built from paper, string, and archival print. Conceptualism, feminist sculpture, Pop, Abstract Expressionism, and the generations that followed: what unites this exhibition is not a movement, but a workshop’s insistence that no vision is too demanding for paper to hold.

photos above: Pressing the Boundaries of Printmaking: Five Decades of Mixographia Installation at Heather James - Palm Desert, California

5

John Baldessari

John Baldessari

Stonehenge (With Two Persons) Yellow 2005 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 29 x 32 in.

Edition 58 of 60, 6 AP, 6 HC, Proofs: 1

8

John Baldessari

Stonehenge (With Two Persons) Violet 2011 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 29 x 32 in.

Edition 36 of 60, 6 AP, 6 HC, Proofs: 1

9

John Baldessari

Stonehenge (With Two Persons) Orange 2005 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 29 x 32 in.

53 of 60, 6 AP, 6 HC, Proofs: 2

10

John Baldessari

A B C Art (Low Relief) 2010 Mixografía® print on handmade paper in 32 parts 82 x 248 x 1 in.

Edition 4 of 7, 5 AP, 5 HC 11

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Crochet I 1998 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 33 x 28 in.

Edition 5 of 50, 13 AP, Proofs: 1

14

Louise Bourgeois

Crochet II 1998 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 28 x 33 in.

Edition 18 of 50, 13 AP, Proofs: 1

15

Louise Bourgeois

Crochet III 1998 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 28 x 33 in.

Edition 9 of 50, 13 AP, Proofs: 1

16

Louise Bourgeois

Crochet IV 1998 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 28 x 33 in.

Edition 30 of 50, 13 AP, Proofs: 1

17

Louise Bourgeois

Crochet V 1998 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 33 x 28 in.

Edition of 50, 13 AP, Proofs: 1

18

Dario Escobar

Dario Escobar

Untitled 2013 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 34 x 24 1/2 in.

Edition 29 of 40, 5 AP, 5 HC , Proofs: 2

22

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler

Guadalupe 1989 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 69 x 45 in.

Edition 44 of 74, 16 AP, 8 HC, Proofs: 3

26

Jacob Hashimoto

Jacob Hashimoto

The Muse 2025 Mixografía® print on handmade paper, archival pigment print, and string 32 1/2 x 29 in.

Edition 1 of 19, 5 AP, 5 HC, Proofs: 5

30

Jacob Hashimoto

The Invention 2025 Mixografía® print on handmade paper, archival pigment print, and string 32 1/2 x 29 in.

Edition 16 of 19, 5 AP, 5 HC, Proofs: 4

31

Jacob Hashimoto

The Fountain 2025 Mixografía® print on handmade paper, archival pigment print, and string 32 1/2 x 29 in.

Edition 6 of 19, 5 AP, 5 HC, Proofs: 4

32

Jacob Hashimoto

The Whirlwind 1998 Mixografía® print on handmade paper, archival pigment print, and string 32 1/2 x 29 in.

Edition 16 of 19, 5 AP, 5 HC, Proofs: 4

33

Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha

Clock 1994 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 40 1/2 x 34 in.

Edition 61 of 75, 7 AP, 7 HC, Proofs: 1

36

Ed Ruscha

Dog 1994 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 27 1/2 x 38 1/2 in.

Edition 58 of 75, 7 AP, 7 HC , Proofs: 1

37

Ed Ruscha

Ghost Station 2011 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 27 1/4 x 46 in.

Edition 12 of 85, 24 AP, Proofs: 2

38

Ed Ruscha

Rusty Signs - Dead End 1 2014 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 24 x 24 in.

Edition 17 of 50, 10 AP, 7 HC, Proofs: 3

39

Manolo Valdes

Manolo Valdes

Perfil I 2011 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 44 x 31 in.

Edition 6 of 25, 6 AP, Proofs: 2

42

Manolo Valdes

Perfil II 2011 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 44 x 31 in.

Edition 14 of 25, 6 AP, Proofs: 2

43

Tom Wesselmann

Tom Wesselmann

Blonde Vivienne 1998 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 40 1/2 x 40 1/2 in.

Edition 11/50

46

Tom Wesselmann

Sunset Nude with Yellow Tulips 2004-06 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 37 3/4 x 41 3/4 in.

Edition 40/75

47

Tom Wesselmann

Still Life With Blonde and Goldfish 2000 Mixografía® print on handmade paper 33 1/4 x 38 3/4 in.

Edition 62/75

48

This catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Pressing the Boundaries of Printmaking: Five Decades of Mixografia at Heather James, Palm Desert, August 17, 2026 - January 7, 2027.

Curation: Chip Tom Exhibition Coordination: Sarah Fischel, Eva Brydson, Lily Brooks Essay by: Sarah Fischel Design by: Timothy Tompkins Copyediting by: Jenna Grotelueschen Image Credits: Artwork Photography: Sean Marateo and Timothy Tompkins Installation Photography: Timothy Tompkins © 2026 Heather James

heatherjames.com

heatherjames.com