Painterly
curated by Pauline Schellmann


Our inaugural exhibition examines the ways in which the archetypal medium of painting translates into prints (and multiples). 

Considering the various photographic and computer-based techniques used by many of today's artists, there is something special and nostalgic about a painting: a work that is physically painted by hand, by the artist. This is the case despite not all paintings necessarily being executed by the artist personally (even the great Leonardo da Vinci had studio assistants) or hand-painted at all, given modern sophisticated technologies that replicate painterly characteristics. 
So, how do artists translate painterly techniques and their visual appearance into editioned artworks?

The traditional printing techniques, etching, aquatint and lithography, were developed and perfected to simulate painterly practices. Later, beginning in the 1960s, silkscreen became the technique of choice to translate colour field and pop art works into limited edition prints. Today, digital pigment printing has become the ubiquitous printing technique that can reproduce any painterly effect. 
Additionally, due to the enormous historical, cultural and emotional value we place on the art of painting, many artists still find ways to reintroduce the “brush stroke” or handwork aesthetics into their prints. 

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Lithography
The artist draws or paints on a pretreated, flat stone using a greasy crayon or tusche. 
The stone is then dampened before ink is applied to its surface. The chemical repulsion 
of grease and water creates a fine structure that allows for soft, semi-transparent ink 
application and colour transitions, thus creating a painterly effect.
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One Cent Life, 1964, was a landmark publication that brought together 20 leading contemporary artists to create a visual manifesto of the 1960s and mark the transition from Abstract Expressionism into early Pop Art. The publication contains 62 works, all printed as lithographs directly from stone. This technique allowed for the reproduction of painterly gestures, especially in a large number of copies, thus tapping into the new fascination with mass-produced art and objects. 

Sam Francis is one of the main representatives of Abstract Expressionism and American Action Painting. He was also particularly interested in printmaking, especially lithography, which allowed him to implement his Tachist style, his formal language consisting of "blobs" and “splashes”.

Alechinsky and Jorn, both members of the COBRA group, were united by a progressive attitude against academic and social norms. Freedom and spontaneity, even childlike naive formal language, was their predominant vocabulary.

As one of the founders of American Abstract Expressionism and the New York School, de Kooning vacillated between abstract and figurative art. He is perhaps best known for his rapid, forceful brushwork and rich, textured impasto technique, evoking human forms. 

In the 1980s, David Salle began quoting motifs of the art world as well as popular mass media images in his artworks, resulting in a mixture of different styles, often abandoning clear pictorial order. 

Having studied natural history and geology, Per Kirkeby largely dedicated his colourful and abstract artistic practice to exploring and paying tribute to nature. 

Stanley Whitney’s dynamically arranged composition of colour and space is a prime example of abstract and colour field painting.

Often cited as the founder of British Pop Art, Richard Hamilton found inspiration in the popular imagery of his time: commodities, advertising, film, photography, fashion, and computer-generated imagery. Soft Pink Landscape is based on a toilet paper advertisement, to which the artist applied seductively beautiful paintwork to create a romanticised and ironised version. The lithographic technique, in addition to screen printing, allow for subtle painterly effects.

Goldstein used techniques and images from advertising and the culture industry to critically examine the images of Western culture conveyed by the media. 

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Etching, Aquatint, Photogravure, etc. 
While etching mainly produces lines or line structures, aquatint etching creates 
halftones by applying a grain to the surface of the printing plate. Depending on the 
density of the grain, halftones and differentiated painterly effects become possible. 
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Chuck Close was best known for his portrait images that consist of large pixels that vary in size and shape and contain little symbols or structures of their own, as can be seen in this Self Portrait. 

A full-blooded painter and film director, who received international acclaim in the 1980s with his Plate Paintings, Schnabel has a great affinity for aquatint etchings, which allow him to translate his expressive painting style to editioned prints.

Förg moves through the formal canon of the great masters of the 1960s and '70s, using their elements and stereotypes with gripping ease. For these works, he painted on a transparent film, which was then transferred onto the litho plate by light exposure.

The photogravure technique transfers the subtleties of the original image with differentiated transitions and produces a soft painterly aesthetic.

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Silkscreen 
Invented for two-dimensional and clearly delineated colour forms, screen printing 
allows for intensive and voluminous colour application. To create halftones and 
colour gradients, the original image has to be converted into a dot pattern. 
Alternatively, multiple print runs (up to 100) can be applied to create differentiated 
tones and colour transitions.
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Warhol famously used screen printing for both his prints on paper as well as his paintings on canvas to reproduce found images from the media, preserving or even emphasising the printing grid. However, in his later works, he also deliberately simulated painterly effects – by his own admission a tribute to the public's expectations of art and painting.

Two silkscreen prints from the portfolio For Joseph Beuys, published in 1987 to commemorate Beuys' death in the year prior. For his contribution, Kounellis tore apart one of his drawings and "sacrificed" it to Beuys.

Peter Halley's Cells and Conduits represent diagrammatically the regulatory practices of modern social and industrial life, giving visual form to organisational systems that we find in everything from computer chips to corporations, buildings and airports. The painterly appearance of the silkscreen was achieved by printing in layers of slightly varied colours, both transparent and opaque. 

Silkscreen – matte or glossy – is very suitable for the graphic reduction in Sarah Morris' paintings and prints. Her work is concerned with decoding the built environment. Focusing on the urban experience, her work explores techniques of communication – the relationship between signs and symbols and their reference in the physical world. The 1997-99 Midtown series focused on the architecture of Manhattan skyscrapers which are signifiers of urban life and corporate power.

Christopher Wool's Three Women is a complex, multi-layered work that is an homage to de Kooning's series of larger-than-life female figures painted on hollow-core wooden door panels. Wool is particularly interested in the process of painting itself, employing a variety of different formal qualities that we associate with the paint medium. For Three Women, the artist used layering, erasing, blurring, and wiping to create painterly qualities while incorporating the very visible dot pattern of the screenprint, a technique the artist uses frequently in his artistic practice.

Polke's famous “Rasterbilder” share visual and conceptual similarities with the works of some of his Pop contemporaries, such as Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol. He also mimicked the aesthetics of commercial, mass production by sourcing motifs from newspapers, blowing them up until the dot pattern became significantly more visible, and then manually transferring this dotted image (German: Rasterbild) onto a canvas. This semi-abstract appropriation of usually banal subjects drawn from German newspapers, questioned the apparent truth, validity and purpose of these images.

For this series of Pardo's unique silkscreen prints, an Iris printing device was used to create smooth colour gradients.

The subtle painterly effect of Gary Hume's Gran is created by layering several different tones and structures. 

A similar technique was used to create the brush stroke structure in Howard Hodgkin's work – the print was run through the silkscreen press 22 times to create subtle colour transitions.

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Digital Pigment Printing
Digital pigment printing has largely replaced the traditional printing techniques and 
become the ubiquitous contemporary fine art printing technique due to its pigment 
richness and greater stability/longevity than other techniques, such as offset. 
Through various kinds of dot patterns, pigment printing can easily achieve a wide range 
of different effects, from rich colour surfaces to the lightest, subtlest tones, or photographic 
reproductions. It also makes very small editions economically feasible. 
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With diabolical and controversial wit, Cattelan re-painted the image of a German faschist propaganda poster for the edition published on the occasion of his exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz.

Marlene Dumas' disturbing, socio-critical images of women and children, which she sources from magazines, pornographic images, or her own Polaroids, radiate a psychological tension. They are filled with human vulnerability and create a striking intimacy with the viewer.

Since the early 1990s, Scheibitz has developed a kind of conceptual painting style that draws upon art-historical references. His work is a search for a new relationship between figuration and abstraction.

For the HISTORYNOW works, Marc Quinn added swirls of paint to iPhone screenshots, thereby obscuring and distorting the underlying images and creating a juxtaposition between the soft clouds of paint and this sturdy device of modern technology.

By muting the background, Amoako Boafo draws our attention to the people in his paintings – their gaze, their mannerisms, sometimes their bright, colourful clothes or accessories, and most importantly, their Black skin. The latter is painted in a way that has become the artist's signature: each swirly brushstroke is visible and gives the skin a unique, vibrant, and multi-layered texture.

Cecily Brown’s expressive paintings combine aspects of both figuration and abstraction and take inspiration from Old Masters and modern painters: the voluptuous bodies of Peter Paul Rubens, the fantastical visual worlds of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, the vigour of Willem de Kooning, the haunting, fractured forms of Francis Bacon, or Joan Mitchell’s rhapsodic treatment of nature. Similar to the Old Masters, Brown’s works also evoke indulgence, excess and sexual imagery – but the gaze is a female one. As can be seen in these two works, the artist’s gestural brushstrokes are just as present in her prints as they are in her paintings.

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Offset Printing
Essentially a commercial mass printing technique, offset printing started to become 
an accepted fine art printing technique in the 1960s. Artists were fond of the easy and 
cost-effective production process that made it possible to create truly affordable prints,
at least in larger editions. Offset printing has largely been replaced by digital printing due
to the latter's pigment quality and its possibility to economically print very small editions.
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Anyone who understands German will instantly recognise the humour and sarcasm Sigmar Polke is known for in the witty title of this work: Die drei Lügen der Malerei (“The three lies of painting”). And the artist added another layer of irony: in the background of the image, there is a very visible impression of a canvas stretcher frame, giving the illusion of a painting, when this is very clearly a print – without even so much as a brushstroke.

Throughout his career, Gerhard Richter has played with the transformation from reproduction to reproduction (to reproduction once more) in both his paintings and his prints. The artist – widely considered to be the greatest painter of our time – often makes use of the offset technique as a particularly unpretentious reproduction technique. 

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Photography
Although many artists work with photographic printing in their editions, interestingly 
there are very few who use photography to reproduce painterly work.
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Gerhard Richter moves effortlessly between the mediums of photography and painting, often combining the two into a single work. When painting from photographs, the artist often imitates the blur of an out-of-focus photograph or that of a badly printed reproduction. On occasion, he has taken the interplay between the two mediums even further by photographing the finished painting, then mounting or framing it to re-create the look of a three-dimensional artwork.

For his edition Fruitful H8-2, Damien Hirst took a somewhat similar approach: colourful paint was applied skilfully in thick layers to create an almost sculptural surface, which was then photographed in a way that preserved the 3D effect. The image was then printed on a thick aluminium composite panel using laminated giclée to create a trompe l‘oeil work that questions the definition of a painting while clearly providing the illusion of one.

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Quoting "Old Masters"
Most contemporary artists share an appreciation of and fascination for Old Master
Paintings, often incorporating specific techniques, styles or even direct references 
to these iconic paintings into their own artworks. 
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Pop artists and those pioneering the movement blurred the line between “high” and ”low” art, borrowing and combining imagery from their contemporary surroundings and mass popular culture. In the works featured here, imagery from classical art is also quoted and combined with ordinary images and items – a simple number and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (Jasper Johns), cigars and Rembrandt's Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (Larry Rivers), car headlights and Peter Paul Rubens' Venus in Front of the Mirror (Robert Rauschenberg).

Andy Warhol almost exclusively worked with silkscreen. His so-called "unique" paintings are silkscreens on canvas, mounted on a stretcher, whereas his prints are silkscreens on paper. Seemingly disrespectfully, he reproduces images of classical paintings and, through repetition and colour variation, creates his own Pop version of these icons.

Michael Craig-Martin on the inspiration behind this work: “I identify with Seurat's desire to honour the ordinary, but I became particularly fascinated by the way that he structured this work [Bathers at Asnières, 1884] by drawing each figure separately and then assembling them to create the scene we see. This is exactly how I work: I draw each object separately and then construct an image from them.”

Cadavre Exquis: a portfolio inspired by the collaborative drawing approach first used by surrealist artists to create bizarre and intuitive drawings. A group of 12 artists was asked to create artworks based on another artist’s preceding work. The starting point was a reproduction of Edouard Manet’s Olympia. 

Looking at the works in Jeff Koons' Gazing Ball series, the viewer sees oneself reflected in the mirrored surface at the same time as one sees the print. This juxtaposition of art historical reference with the viewer’s present-day reflection invites a dialogue about the meaning of time and how we transcend it.

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Simulated Brushstroke
Given the cultural significance of a painting and its characteristic brushstrokes, it is not 
surprising that simulating it provides an interesting challenge and subject for many artists. 
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Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke series depicts the gestural expression of a brushstroke but has a distinct mechanically-produced appearance. Similar to the way in which comics simulate movement through dynamic strokes, Lichtenstein's Brushstroke works depict the painting style of action painters and Abstract Expressionism with humour and irony.

David Reed’s "brushstrokes" are painted as detailed and often highly manipulated gestures. His compressed images create a visual tension within the overall work’s horizontal structure and create the appearance of a filmstrip.

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Painter's Tools
Like artist's studios, the tools of a painter seem to evoke a particular fascination and 
as such have often been made a part or the main subject of artworks.
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Michael Craig Martin's 2018 work of an abstract bucket of paintbrushes alludes to the iconic Savarin coffee can with paint brushes that Jasper Johns did in many variations in the 1960s and '70s. 

In 1969, Jim Dine made an artist palette the subject of a series of prints and multiples: Four Palettes.

Almost 20 years later, Tony Cragg also made use of the artist palette to create his aptly-named 1986 edition Palette. The artist first gained international recognition with his so-called “mosaic” sculptures, made from discarded plastic fragments that he would skilfully arrange on the floor or the wall. Cragg referenced these works by covering this wooden palette in plastic granules.

Arman created his multiple 20 Tubes, 2004 by serially arranging used, soiled paint tubes in a box frame, thus creating one of his landmark Accumulation works. 

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Handpainted / Unique Editions 
The line between editioned and unique works is sometimes blurry. Particularly when 
artists include handworked elements in their editions or create editions where each 
work is actually unique. 
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Joseph Beuys, the influential German sculptor, performance artist, art theorist and teacher, never made a traditional painting on canvas, but he did create a number of oil paintings on paper. The works in this extraordinary edition series from 1976, which the artist considered "paintings" and titled them accordingly, consist of hand-torn sheets of paper, which were painted on by hand, using oil paint and butter.

The complete 3-Tonnen-Edition (3 Ton Edition) series that Joseph Beuys worked on from 1973 to 1985 consists of almost 1,150 works, most of which were reworked by hand in some way. These handwork details include oil paint (Browncross), handwriting, stamps, and cut-outs. 

Daniel Buren rejects traditional paintings for their bourgeois nature and faux inwardness. Instead, the artist developed a seemingly non-artistic system of 8.7 cm wide stripes and systematically investigates their artistic potential in site-specific installations and prints. Here, the artist used a large, striped piece of awning cloth, painted the outer white stripes with white acrylic paint (front and back) and subsequently cut the fabric into 30 unique triangles.

Merz paints with a big brush and heavy paint, Grosse sprays in spontaneous gestures.

Between 1992 and 2009, Edition Schellmann asked artists to conceive a site-specific wall painting or installation, to be executed by a skilled craftsman in the space/wall of the buyer, according to precise instructions by the artists. The complete series Wall Works comprises over 50 unique wall works and is now part of the collection of Hamburger Bahnhof/Nationalgalerie, Berlin. 

With his handpainted corner pieces, Artschwager ironically imitates Formica, an artificial, commercial faux wood material. The sometimes surrealistic works of Artschwager are marked by a subversive engagement with minimalism and Pop Art. The artist’s use of materials never employed in art before draw attention to the everyday and convey a deadpan humour.

These chairs are part of Damien Hirst's larger body of “Spin” paintings where the artist pours paint onto a mechanically rotating canvas (in this case a chair designed by Jasper Morrison), thus instilling the work with a palpable sense of movement. 

Damien Hirst took an interesting approach when conceiving his edition Painting-By-Numbers, 2001: this work comes with all the necessary tools for the buyer to execute this work themselves. Not only are the artist’s tools at the centre of this work (without being the artwork itself), but it also raises interesting questions about concept vs authorship vs execution.
 

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