ART FORMS come and go but there is one constant in traditional and contemporary art and it is printmaking. This often dark art ranges from older methods of etching, drypoint, mezzotint, woodcut, through to lithography, collagraph, screen printing, photo etching and digital printing.
For the last 45 years, Glasgow Print Studio (GPS) has been at the epicentre of the Scottish art scene and has been the place for artists to go if they wanted to experiment under the watchful eyes of its residents experts.
Anything goes at GPS. As Jacki Parry, a former head of printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), says: "If you can ink it you can print it."
INK has been selected from GPS' extensive Archive collection by Sam Ainsley, David Harding, Sandy Moffat. The three artists all taught at GSA in the 1980s and 1990s and we hugely influential on generations of students.
As one former student, Ross Sinclair, puts it: "Sam Ainsley, David Harding and Sandy Moffat have been instrumental in the development of the culture of art born in Glasgow and exported around the world for over 25 years. Put simply – the very idea of Glasgow as a new and vibrant centre for visual art would not exist on the scale or depth without their sustained efforts over a lifetime.”
INK brings together 56 works by 52 artists from Glasgow Print Studio's extensive archive of over 1500 prints made by artists since the founding of the studio in 1972.
Many of the prints created at Glasgow Print Studio have gone on to weave their way into our nation's collective consciousness. Works such as the Title Page of Alasdair Gray's epic novel, Lanark, a lithograph which he made at GPS in 1981, get a well deserved airing. Gray's fellow polymath John Byrne is represented by a 1972 etching called Girl with Monkey, which is signed using the pseudonym, Patrick.
There's some cracking work on the walls, ranking from prints by John Bellany and Philip Reeves (a founder member of the Edinburgh Printmakers in 1967 and then GPS five years later) to more recent prints by artists such as Elizabeth Blackadder, Jim Lambie, Richard Wright and Christine Borland.
Some of the work is even for sale so this could be your chance to snap up a piece of Scottish art history.
INK: Public Archive, Glasgow Print Studio, Trongate 103, Glasgow until March 26.
www.glasgowprintstudio.co.uk
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