Title

Sydney Printmakers: Beyond the surface [2002].

Collective title

Stdney Printmakers

Venues

UTS Gallery (21 May 2002 – 14 June 2002)

Date

(2002)

Summary

Multi-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (NSW). Prints

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

The extraordinary talent and creativity of 34 of the Sydney Printmakers group will be exhibited at the University of Technology, Sydney Gallery from 21 May to 14 June 2002.

Beyond the Surface is the theme of the exhibition, the second of its kind hosted at UTS and organised by the Sydney Printmakers since the exhibition, Revelations, washeld in 1999.

Contributing artists have freely interpreted the exhibition's theme, producing original works using a broad range of processes including screenprints, linocuts, woodcuts, solar plate etchings, lithographs, collagraphs and digital prints.

UTS Gallery Curator Felicity Sheehan said the diversity of the works in the exhibition was impressive and a testament to the creativity of the Sydney Printmakers group. Ms Sheehan said. "Viewers will enjoy the innovative ways various traditional printmaking techniques have been combined with newer processes to produce two and three dimensional works."

In the exhibition catalogue, Mirabel FitzGerald, a Senior Lecturer in print media at the Sydney College of the Arts said the "surface" was invariably a preoccupation for artists working in a print medium.

"Printmakers are both frustrated and alternatively seduced by the fascination their work attracts for it's surface qualities," Ms Fitzgerald said. "So often the response is to the richness of the black aquatint, the sensual washes of colour laid down by the woodblock or lithographic wash. The concept or "what lies beneath" the tactile surface is over-looked or somehow swamped by the materiality of process.

"Beyond the Surface presents artists who might be grouped as taking either of two approaches. One where the image emerges as an integral part of the process of its making. Alternatively, when the concept dominates, the medium is not so much ignored as given a lesser importance than the content or idea."

The Sydney Printmakers are a professional group of exhibiting artists showing their work regularly both in Australia and overseas. The group has been maintained as a volunteer artist-run society since 1960. Although the initial impetus was to revive the practice of producing 'original prints', the Group also actively promotes exhibiting printmaking as a vital part of cultural expression.

Ms Fitzgerald said printmaking had been revived and stimulated by new technology, particularly through the proliferation of digital media as a graphic tool.

"In the arena of contemporary art however, the perception of original prints is still weighed down by the baggage attached to its craft traditions," she said. "There is a contradiction in the attitude that 'new technology' somehow elevates the image, whereas older traditional processes cannot appropriately be adapted to a contemporary idiom."

"This is the challenge that artists using print media now have to take up. All technologies, simple and sophisticated are there to integrate and give meaning to the visual idea." [gallery media]