Paris Danube Print Salon

The etchings Morgon and Bakgård by Mamma Andersson convey idyllic scenes of a meandering river and a sheer cliff face in the landscape. Butterflies light up at dawn in Morgon while a river winding its way through the landscape makes up as the main motif. The image is an open invitation to become immersed in nature as the scenery dissolves into the horizon. In contrast, a view of the landscape is abruptly blocked by a looming mountainside that dominates Bakgård, while a delicately glowing sky appears in the background through the trees. In both prints, tactile qualities of nature 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 and sugar lift aquatints.

Printmaking, especially woodcut, has long been an integral part of Mamma Andersson’s artistic practice, and her involvement with the medium has intensified since she purchased her own printing press for her studio in Sweden. Although she has worked with a wide range of printing techniques, her print project with BORCH Editions marked her first encounter with the drypoint technique.
Mamma Andersson was born in Luleå, Sweden, in 1962 and lives and works in Stockholm. She has been collaborating with BORCH Editions since 2019.

For Leochicospeedy, Huma Bhabha created a series of expressionistic portraits of deities or a race of gods executed in photogravure and etching. Although the works convey an almost nightmarish atmosphere, the underlying photos taken by the artist are of three playing dogs: Leo, Chico, and Speedy. The dogs belonged to the artist’s brother, who passed away in 2015, and to the artist, they represent his legacy. Huma Bhabha uses the image of the dog similarly to the way Joseph Beuys uses the coyote and the hare: as a mediator between humans and nature.

Ever shifting between figuration and abstraction, Bhaba’s work deals with what she describes as ‘eternal concerns’ found across all cultures: war, colonialism, and memories of home. In her works on paper, she creates atmospheric portraits, often blending animal and human features.
Huma Bhabha, born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1962, lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. She has been collaborating with BORCH Editions since 2007.

Andreas Eriksson lives in the Swedish countryside in an area characterised by wild and diverse landscapes. He has a genuine affinity to the nature in which he lives, and his works arise from this intimate connection – nature forms the conditions and provides the material for Eriksson’s work. In the etchings the flickering graininess evokes a certain physicality and heightens the ambiguity about whether the composition depicts nature on a micro or macro scale. The composition is not necessarily a representation of a specific place but evokes a feeling of nature. As in his paintings, shaded fields of colour meet and coalesce. Eriksson works with textures printed from multiple plates to bring forth a play between ambiguous light and dark forms in the final print.

Andreas Eriksson’s work is often based on everyday phenomena and the surrounding scenery of his home in Sweden. Eriksson’s poetic translations of his natural environment are created in a variety of media including painting, photography, sculpture, tapestry, installation, and printmaking.
Andreas Eriksson, born in 1975 in Björsäter, Sweden, lives and works in Medelplana, Sweden. Eriksson has been collaborating with BORCH Editions since 2021.

It was in Niels Borch Jensen’s studio that Per Kirkeby’s early experiments with small scale etchings developed into an ambitious, live-long engagement with the medium of printmaking which encompassed colouration, format and printing techniques, among them the production of monoprints. Monoprints are unique prints created from a printing plate. When creating his 2017 prints, Kirkeby initially worked on copper plates in a variety of etching techniques. After masterprinter Mette Ulstrup had inked the plates, Kirkeby added individual marks in crayon and watercolour to complete the composition. The result is a series of dense, multi-layered prints merging Kirkeby’s signature painterly expression with his decades of printmaking experience.

Printmaking was a crucial part of Per Kirkeby’s artistic practice. Working with a scientifically educated eye – Kirkeby also held a degree in arctic geology – he developed a unique visual vocabulary between abstraction and figuration that was inspired by natural phenomena without aiming at naturalistic representation.
Per Kirkeby (1938 – 2018) worked with BORCH Editions from 1979 until 2017.

Reference to cinema is an essential pillar of Matt Saunders’ art practice. At the core of each print in Saunders’ series of landscape etchings, the cinematic landscapes represent a longing for a distant place—whether in time or space. In an allusion to Wallace Stevens’ poem Six Significant Landscapes, the series comprises six prints. Drawn from film stills, each of Saunders‘ landscapes is at once an empty scene open to projection and an emblem of the emotive and narrative currents swirling off camera. Together, the series reflects the filmmakers that have had a profound impact on Saunders’ practice and how cinema can evoke a longing for the unknown and mysterious.

Matt Saunders’ work challenges the boundaries of artistic media. He enacts painting as a time-based and transitive medium through his camera-less photography, multi-screen animation and innovative painting and printmaking processes. Best known for his haunting portraits and landscapes and moving-image works, Saunders’ practice uses analogue materials to explore the fleetingness, mobility and affective power of images.
Matt Saunders, born 1975 in Tacoma, Washington, lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts and Berlin, Germany. Matt Saunders has been collaborating with BORCH Editions since 2014.