First, Second & Third Chimney

The three woodcuts Jan Svenungsson created with BORCH Editions between 1996 and 1998 are related to his ongoing sculpture project of brick chimneys installed in public spaces.
Over a two year period this idea turned into a tour de force of craftmanship and determination, which expanded the boundaries of contemporary woodcut printmaking.
Svenungsson used the photomechanical principle of combining four colours – yellow, magenta, cyan, and black – to create the illusion of continuous colour. Working from photographs of his sculptures, he isolated these four colours and then hand-carved each individual dot in a painstakingly detailed process. With each small dot shaped individually, it took him months to finish the first print’s yellow plate. After test-printing this first plate once in BORCH Editions’ Copenhagen studio, he spent the following two years hand-carving the other eleven plates without any further test prints.
In 1998 Svenungsson returned to Copenhagen to print the plates – starting with yellow, the lightest of the colours, and moving through magenta and cyan to black in order to minimize the risk of smudging. The result of this two-year long printmaking experiment is one of the studio’s most ambitious and elaborate endeavours in the time-honoured medium of woodcut printmaking.