Print and Multiples
On the plate, the block, the screen — the source that makes all copies possible.
Every print begins with a matrix: the carved woodblock, the etched copper plate, the silkscreen mesh through which ink is forced. The matrix is the origin that is never seen in the finished work — it is prior, generative, and usually destroyed or retired once the edition is complete. This exhibition considers the matrix as a primary object in its own right: the decision-making surface where the image is constructed in reverse, the thing that holds the negative of what will be seen, and the structure that determines how many times an image can be born and whether each birth will be identical.
On numbered copies, artificial scarcity, and the market logic of the multiple.
The edition is printmaking's most revealing convention: by numbering and limiting copies, it converts reproduction into rarity and restores to the multiple the aura that reproduction was supposed to dissolve. Walter Benjamin identified the aura as what mechanical reproduction destroys; the numbered edition immediately set about reconstructing it. This exhibition examines the edition as a social and economic form — the logic by which 3/50 is worth more than 50/50 despite being physically identical, and the artists who have challenged this logic by making editions of unlimited size, refusing to number at all, or destroying the matrix publicly to guarantee that no further copies will ever exist.
On reproduction, Benjamin's aura, and what is lost and found in multiplication.
Printmaking is the art form that most directly confronts the question Benjamin posed in 1935: what happens to a work of art when it can be mechanically reproduced? The print does not copy an original — it is the original, produced in multiple. There is no first and second impression in principle, only impressions. Yet the history of printmaking is saturated with the language of originality: the "original print," the "hand-pulled impression," the certificate of authenticity. This exhibition holds the contradiction open, examining what survives of uniqueness inside a medium whose entire premise is repetition.
On the image that travels, multiplies, and exceeds its maker's intentions.
Print was the first mass medium: Dürer's woodcuts circulated across Europe in numbers no painting could approach; political broadsides and pamphlets shaped revolutions; the poster brought art into streets and factories. The multiple was always also a vehicle — an image designed to move, to be handed from person to person, to appear where the original could never go. This exhibition considers dissemination as a political and aesthetic condition: how the desire to reach more people has driven technical innovation in printmaking, and how the image that circulates freely changes meaning as it travels into contexts its maker never anticipated.
On the book as form, sequence as structure, and the page as site.
The artist's book is the multiple at its most complex: it uses the conventions of the book — sequence, the turn of the page, the relationship between recto and verso — as an artistic medium rather than a container for content. From William Blake's illuminated books to Dieter Roth's deteriorating editions to Ulises Carrión's theoretical manifesto "The New Art of Making Books," the artist's book has consistently been a site where image, text, material, and time are organized into a form that no wall-mounted work can achieve. This exhibition treats the book not as a reduced or accessible format but as a specific and irreducible artistic proposition.
On the tactile, the pressed, and the intelligence of physical transfer.
The print is made by pressure: ink forced through a mesh, a plate pressed against paper, a block bearing down on a surface. This physical contact produces qualities that no other image-making process can replicate — the embossed edge of an intaglio plate, the slightly irregular ink deposit of a woodblock, the precise mesh pattern visible in a screenprint under magnification. This exhibition insists on the print's irreducible physicality: the specific qualities of surface, texture, and material transfer that distinguish a hand-pulled impression from any reproduction of it, and that make the encounter with a print an encounter with evidence of a specific making.
On public address, the image in the street, and art that must compete for attention.
The poster is the print form most fully committed to the social world: it is designed to be read in motion, at a distance, by people who did not choose to look at it. Its aesthetics are the aesthetics of legibility and impact — bold color, strong contrast, decisive typography — and its history runs from Toulouse-Lautrec's music hall advertisements to the revolutionary posters of Cuba and China to contemporary street art. This exhibition examines the poster as a distinct artistic intelligence: the discipline of making an image that must work in a second, in sunlight, across a street, and that must compete with everything else demanding attention on the wall beside it.
On the working state, the trial impression, and the print that was never meant to be final.
Before the edition is pulled, there are proofs: trial impressions made to test the image at various stages of its development, to check the registration, to see what the ink is doing, to decide whether to cut further into the plate. These working states are among the most revealing objects in printmaking — they show the image in formation, often more raw and more alive than the finished edition. Rembrandt reworked his etchings through multiple states, each one a distinct work; the proof tradition reveals printmaking as a process of continuous revision rather than a single decisive act.
On affordability, access, and the utopian promise of art for everyone.
The Fluxus multiples of the 1960s made a political claim: that art should be affordable, portable, and available to anyone rather than reserved for collectors with museum-scale budgets. The multiple was a democratic object — a Fluxus kit could be mailed, opened on a kitchen table, and used by anyone. This promise has never been fully redeemed: even multiples develop markets, acquire rarity, and become collectible. But the aspiration persists, and this exhibition examines it seriously — asking what it would mean for art to be genuinely accessible, and whether the multiple is the form that comes closest to answering that question.
On translation between surfaces, the logic of the negative, and reversal as method.
Printmaking thinks in reverse: the image on the matrix is a mirror of the image that will be printed, and every mark must be made in the knowledge that it will be flipped. This reversal is not merely technical — it produces a distinct kind of thinking, a spatial intelligence that operates through negatives and transfers rather than direct inscription. This exhibition considers transfer as a conceptual operation across its full range: the technical reversal of the print, the transfer of image between surfaces in Rauschenberg's solvent transfers, the logic of the impression as a form of translation in which something is always gained and something is always lost.
On propaganda, resistance, and the image made to change something.
Print has been the medium of political urgency across five centuries: Luther's pamphlets, Goya's "Disasters of War," the Republican posters of the Spanish Civil War, the woodcuts of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, the protest graphics of May 1968. Its reproducibility made it the natural medium of movements that needed to reach many people quickly and cheaply. This exhibition examines the political print not as historical artifact but as a living practice — asking what forms political urgency takes when images circulate digitally, whether the handmade print retains a specific authority in a world of mass reproduction, and what it means to make an image that is explicitly designed to produce an effect in the world.
On the monotype, the contradiction, and the print that refuses to be repeated.
The monotype is printmaking's most paradoxical form: it uses the apparatus of reproduction — the plate, the press, the transfer of ink to paper — to produce a single unique image that cannot be exactly repeated. It is a print that denies what prints are for. Degas made hundreds of monotypes, finding in the medium's resistance to repetition a freedom unavailable in conventional printing. This exhibition considers the unique print as a site of productive contradiction — where the logic of the multiple is invoked and immediately refused, and where the encounter between the mechanical and the singular produces something that neither painting nor conventional printmaking can achieve alone.