Title

Hot off the Press: New directions for Sydney Printmakers.

Venues

Manly Art Gallery (16 July 2011 – 28 August 2011)

Wagga Wagga Art Gallery [3] (5 October 2912 – 9 December 2012)

Date

(2011 – 2012)

Summary

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

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

The innovation and brilliance of contemporary Australian printmaking are now on display at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, in Hot Off the Press: New Directions, celebrating fifty years of one of the nation‟s most influential printmaking organisations, the Sydney Printmakers.

Established as an artist-run project in 1961, Sydney Printmakers is a community of contemporary practicing artists who actively promote printmaking as a vital form of cultural expression. The current members of the group are involved in all aspects of contemporary printmaking – etching, lithography, relief prints, serigraphs and digital technology – and all are active as practitioners and exhibitors in the Sydney arts scene.

Hot Off the Press was curated and launched by Therese Kenyon, Director of the Manly Art Gallery & Museum (now retired), and the touring exhibition was selected by Akky Van Ogtrop, President of the Print Council of Australia. It features fifty-six artists representing a broad range of printmaking media including linocut, lithograph, etching and digital printmaking. Reaching far beyond orthodox definitions of an „original print‟, Sydney Printmakers today embraces a wide range of contemporary and innovative print methodologies including monoprints, handcoloured „unique state‟ prints and new technologies such as inkjet and digital photo printing (laser imaging).

In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Professor Sasha Grishin (Sir William Dobell Professor of Art History, Australian National University) states that Hot Off the Press “is not simply a show that demonstrates the activities of most of the members of this organisation, but it can also be viewed as a report card in the state of printmaking in Australia. What is particularly attractive is the complete lack of dominance of any single style, medium or prevailing theoretic orthodoxy. Like the broader Australian printmaking scene, the Sydney Printmakers in this exhibition have embraced the widest possible range of printmaking technologies.”[Wagga Wagga Art Gallery Media Release, 6 October 2012]