INTRODUCTION
A
bronze spider, cradling an egg sac, looms above gallery visitors on its spindly legs. Five vast slabs of weathering steel create at once both a cave to hide in and an arrowhead that directs the eyes of passers-by to the sky. A statue of a woman, her face turned up to heaven – but why is her ankle chained… and is that fur growing from her skin? A colossal ten-storey contortion of red PVC sheeting that can never be seen, or photographed, in its entirety.
The artists who made these iconic sculptures – Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra, Kiki Smith and Anish Kapoor, respectively – are also highly regarded for their printmaking. Sculpture and printmaking have an affinity: it’s bewitching when a sculptor brings their sensibility for space to the constraints of a single plane, and unafraid of technical experiment, explores different means of making marks. They appreciate the positive and negative elements of the matrix, the surface textures of ink and paper. They relish the degree of chance that attends work in the print studio, not dissimilar to the creation and casting of a mould – and like that process, often requiring collaboration. The scale the artist works on may have changed, but the infinitesimal details – the thickness of a sheet of paper, the proportions of the matrix – are just as significant. In the intaglio process (used in many of the prints in this exhibition) a soft burr curls up from the incised lines, depressions are formed in the surface of the plate. The artist learns to gauge how the depth to which the plate is scratched with a needle or corroded by aquatint determines the quality of the line.
Such technicalities are easily forgotten on encountering a print by Anish Kapoor. Like Rothko’s late paintings, these radiant works completely envelope the viewer. The Shadow III and Horizon Shadow series present bands of light and darkness out of which vibrate rich fields of colour – aquamarine, scarlet, magenta, cobalt blue. Kapoor’s prints are a disorientating reminder of the miracle of optics, so hypnotic that the viewer feels attuned to the reception of light on the photo receptors of their retina. The colours recall the mountains of vivid powdered pigment in Kapoor’s sculptures, in particular his signature red. In defiance of convention, these prints extend into the bleed, the ink sweeping to the very edge of the paper (and beyond), unconcerned by the abrupt amputation at its limits. Fold develops this idea further, breaking away from the flat plane of the paper, bisecting the print to create a form both convex and concave. The seductive contours of Fold are reflected in the dynamic curves of Louise Bourgeois’ etching Sainte Sébastienne. This reworking of the fey Christian martyr as a strong female figure typifies the artist’s punning