IFPDA Print Fair 2025

Throughout her oeuvre, Mamma Andersson has explored and reshaped the genres of still life, interiors, and landscapes.

Potpurri is striking for its combination of a still life composition against a background of a sepia toned stylized landscape. The etching is a testimony to Andersson’s uncanny ability to translate unspoken moods into imagery through her use of a combination of intaglio techniques, giving voice to her striking visual language. Tactile qualities are evoked with the combined use of finely etched lines, the blurs of the drypoint technique, together with the painterly brushstroke effects of spit bite aquatints.

In the few years since his first collaboration with BORCH Editions, Ragnar Kjartansson has built up an extensive portfolio of prints, which testifies to his commitment to the medium.

Kjartansson’s prints demonstrate his curiosity about the technical and aesthetic possibilities of printmaking, as well as his ability to translate quintessential components of his artistic practice into the print medium. The principle of working in series is central to the medium of printmaking, and Kjartansson has long been employing this idea in his work across artistic mediums. Permeated by romantic melancholy, his new prints convey Kjartansson’s sense for the comedic potential in tragedy, and his openness for different interpretations of his work.

In the chromatic large-scale prints Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Julie Mehretu combines photogravure with classic intaglio printing techniques. The base layers are distorted news images from anti-immigration protests. The media images are blurred to allow the subliminal forms, color and light from the photos to merge with the complex compositions of agitated gestures and erasures which Mehretu executed on copper plates in a variety of printing techniques.

Mehretu’s painting and drawing practice has long been complemented by printmaking projects.

Her first collaboration with BORCH Editions, Epigraph, Damascus (2016), marked a point of departure both in terms of scale and technical complexity of her print projects. The prints from Slouching Towards Bethlehem testify to the shift in Mehretu’s painterly practice reflecting her preoccupation with modified digital imagery as well as her evolved mark-making.

Wardell Milan’s large-scale prints are complex, multi-layered compositions that combine a myriad of etching techniques. They depict human bodies immersed in arcadian landscapes, which were drawn on copper plates with etching needles, brushes and acid. Milan’s new prints offer an almost utopian counterproposal to his previous etchings, which referred to the political and social reality of the United States with explicit and at times brutal honesty.

For all their serenity, the etchings still present the human body as fundamentally political: his protagonists interact not through words, but through body language and touch; they seem removed from societal power struggles, but they still negotiate social relationships through sexual and spiritual intimacy.

Milan carefully planned and executed the individual pictorial elements, but deliberately delayed decisions regarding the overall compositions until the individual printing plates were assembled for proofing. He thus combines the signature technical precision of his work on copper plates with the intuitive feel for the construction of multi-layered pictorial spaces, which he developed through his practice in the medium of collage.

A woman’s face is seen through a cloverleaf-shaped opening. The white foreground emphazises the act of looking as it creates an opening from which the woman comes into view. Individual details are accentuated using the blind embossing technique, which highlights sections of the work by printing without ink. Frida Orupabo has consistently reminded us of the power of the gaze and the impact of images by letting figures re-emerge as active subjects that refuse to be objectified. Clover I and II depict the actress Carol Speed portraying the title character in the 1974 blaxploitation horror movie Abby. Orupabo utilises the contradictory potential of her imagery by detaching it from its original context: formerly the object of the viewer’s voyeuristic gaze, the portrayed figure now stares back out of the image. Isolated from the film plot, it becomes possible to re-interpret her frothing facial expression perhaps as anger, despair or disgust in the face of the exploitative gaze to which she is subjected.

The everyday life of Tal R’s family members is the focus of a new series of prints made with BORCH Editions. Finding inspiration in his close surroundings and relationships, Tal R extracts the essence of these experiences through his own distinct artistic vocabulary. Several of the motifs also appear in more recent paintings by the artist. In the process of repetition, they eventually become not just part of the artist’s retained private memory, but more universal motifs. Similar to the accumulating memories we all keep in images on our phones, the prints by Tal R are extracts of the artist’s enormous image bank and personal life.

Transformations of the artists’ experiences are extracted onto paper in a rich combination of woodcut and etching, that causes the eye to wander between painted brushstrokes of sugar lift aquatint and brightly coloured areas of woodgrain.

Fiona Tan’s Technicolor Dreaming series are related to her film installation Footsteps, created for her 2022 solo exhibition at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Tan selected the images for the six prints by instinct; some of them are taken from the film, others from the museum’s archive. This choice of imagery connects Technicolor Dreaming to the film and, at the same time, creates an independent, self-contained project.

The images possess an ethnographical quality, capturing Dutch workers’ living conditions or strolling school children in traditional attire. They are typical images of the time, displaying life and society in the Netherlands in the early 20th century.

Technicolor Dreaming is informed by Tan’s interest in early filmmakers’ obsession with colour, when frames were hand coloured in a lengthy, elaborate process using small brushes and stencils. Unlike in printmaking, perfect registration was not possible. Likewise, in the prints, “the colours have their own life, dancing on top of the image”, as Tan herself puts it.