Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu was in town for the "Cosmos: A Group Exhibition" reception at Crown Point on Friday night. Her new prints, The Residual, and Unclosed are the centerpiece of the exhibition. She signed prints in the afternoon, and when that was done signed there was time to talk and nibble.


A girl could get lost in these prints.


It looks like Kathan Brown is tossing pixie dust, but she's showing Julie Mehretu's lovely sister, Neeshan Mehretu, Tom Marioni's Taking Flight.


If anyone is in Williamstown, MA, you can catch Mehretu's City Sitings at Williams College Museum. City Sitings started out in Detroit - it's a chance to see 11 of her monumental paintings at once. This is just one of them:


Grey Space (distractor), Julie Mehretu 2006.

If you can't make it that far, come back and see the new prints again and watch the video interview , which is great.

Crown Point Press Hits the Midwest

Our gallery associate, Tiffany Harker just got back from Minneapolis, where she was representing Crown Point Press at the Minneapolis Print and Drawing Fair, hosted by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in this lovely building:




She brought work from Ed Ruscha and Amy Sillman, and...




...Wayne Thibaud, Pat Steir, and Richard Tuttle and others. Dorothy Napangardi's works seemed to excite everybody there. There were books, including the NEW title in the Magical Secrets Series, Magical Secrets about Aquatint: Spit Bite, Sugar Lift and Other Etched Tones,
by Emily York, which is being shipped here as I type this - for everybody who pre-ordered it and everyone who wants to run in to the Crown Point Bookstore sometime after May 5.....



Many of the other exhibitors at the Minneapolis Print and Drawing Fair deal in Old Master prints. Some visitors who are already in love with the kind of touch evident in historical etching were interested in the “Look Ma, no hands!” quality of techniques like sugar lift and spit bite, used by our artists, as well as the idea of a connection between new art and very old art through the process of etching.

Tiffany visited the Walker Art Center (which she has a crush on) where she was thrilled to see Transcending: The New International, Julie Mehretu's epic 2003 painting.

She was really impressed by the education and outreach efforts of both the Walker and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Thursday evening, she went to a panel discussion on the exhibit "Next Exit: The Shifting Landscape of Suburbia" which brought together a developer, a designer and a journalist. She was all ready to dislike the developer, but he turned out to be working earnestly on developing city centers and mass transit planning, Surprise! She found the talk made her want to go back and see the show again.



A sculpture by Sol Lewitt, another Crown Point Press artist, was presiding over the Walker's cloud-menaced roof garden.

Come see Crown Point Press at the BookExpo America in Los Angeles May 30-June 1, and at Art Basel in Switzerland, June 4-8. we are everywhere!

All photographs (except the one of the MIA) by Tiffany Harker.

The Cosmos

A new group exhibition is going up at Crown Point Press.
The Cosmos: A Group Exhibition runs April 10-May 31, 2008.

The newest work is from Julie Mehretu's second project at Crown Point Press.

The Residual, Julie Mehretu 2007

Unclosed, Julie Mehretu 2007

In quite a few of these works, I keep referring to my favorite John Ashbery line, "Holes are blobs of darkness." Holes are voids and objects, and who knows what is in them along with the darkness? Individual marks can do so many kinds of things. Mehretu has talked about giving each of her marks “individual agency,” and several of the other artists in this show want that too.

Holland Cotter once called Mehretu's work a "conceptual version of history painting." The marks in The Residual and Unclosed are advancing on each other like armies converging, but they are soothed by sanding down and soft fogs of color. Some of the color might refer to glow from distant explosions but it looks so gentle.

Dorothy Napangardi's Sandhills uses individual marks that evoke movements over time (her work involves the Australian Aboriginal concept of Jukurrpa or Dreaming which describes the travels of ancestors and maps the location of living spirits.) It has such a different mood than Mehertu’s operatic orchestration. Each dot could be somebody's footprint, or a whole year spent in one place.

Sandhills, Dorothy Napangardi 2004

Fred Wilson's Bang also traffics in discrete marks. The drip pattern in Bang might refer to the Big Bang, cell division at conception, or deadly bacteria booming in a petri dish, but I like to think of the individual tiny bangs of each drop hitting the page. It's like the bottom of a liquid hourglass. They preserve the time that they took to fall on the page. You can almost hear them. They are very loud.

Bang, Fred Wilson 2004

There is more noise coming from Tom Marioni's Taking Flight, which is a woodcut the artist made by having friends throw darts at a piece of wood. The dart marks look just like silver stars, but once you know how it was made you hear each one hitting the wood. Stars are usually so quiet.

Taking Flight, Tom Marioni 2000

Come see the show, the reception is May 15.

Crown Point Artists Influential at Whitney Biennial

Crown Point Press artists, John Baldessari, Robert Bechtle, Mary Heilmann, and Sherrie Levine, are in the Whitney Biennial this year. Holland Cotter identified Mary Heilmann and John Baldessari as "influential elders" of the show in his New York Times review.


Mary Heilmann, Spill, 2007.

John Baldessari, Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), Etc.: Elbow (Blue) with Desk, 2007.

According to Cotter, Heilmann is holding sway over younger artists Karen Kilimnik and Rachel Harrison, while Baldessari has given grist to a bunch of young artists including the collaborative entity New Humans, Patrick Hill and Joe Bradley.

Our gallery assistant, Lauren Karas will be there later this week. She'll tell us what she thinks.

The Biennial has a blog, too.

Oliveira on Valentines Day at CPP

Nathan Oliveira's show Rocker II opened on Valentine's Day at Crown Point Press. The house was packed.




The work sparked lots of lively debate...





Oliveira was willing to consider all the angles...





And everyone came dressed in their Valentine's day finest.





This project was printer Ianne Kjorlie's first as lead printer.





Oliveira worked hard, but made it look so easy.




Come by and see this beautiful work -- the show is open through April 5, 2008.

Coming Soon! New Magical Secrets Book

Crown Point Press master printer Emily York’s new book, Magical Secrets about Aquatint: Spit Bite, Sugar Lift & Other Etched Tones Step-by-Step is due out in April. If you would like to pre-order, email sasha@crownpoint.com, or give us a call at 415.974.6273.

I caught Emily for a few minutes between printing tasks to ask her about the new book and what she learned writing it.

KLB: If there is one common error that you hope people will never make again after reading your book, what is it?

EY: Over-melting the rosin. It’s something I did in college, and I was always trying to correct it in the printing, but it’s actually a mistake people make right at the beginning of the process.

KLB: When you were researching the book, what work did you fall in love with the most? I remember you getting excited about Tony Cragg.

EY: I only knew some of the artists in the book through the prints they made here before I started the research. It was really great to find the connections between their outside work and the prints. Tony Cragg’s sculpture was one of those surprises.

KLB: What is your favorite technique to explain?

EY: In terms of aquatint, something spontaneous that people like the idea of right away is spit bite. You’re etching the plate directly, by painting with acid on a plate prepared with rosin. The mark you make on the plate is the mark you see printed, so it’s conceptually the easiest. It’s really easy to grab onto and jump right in. A lot of people like the look of it, plus it has a quirky little name.

I kept thinking, “Oh, this chapter’s going to be easy, it’s just spit bite!” But there are all these things that you do without thinking. There is a lot more information than I thought. In the first two chapters those little things are especially important because they make the foundation for every other technique. That’s what I was excited about sharing, because the easiest little changes can make a huge difference.

KLB: How would you like your book to change the way people think about printmaking?

EY: For me, the most important thing about this book is the opportunity to relate the techniques to contemporary artists who are working now. I like to see artists discovering new approaches to these techniques all the time, the back and forth between their prints and other studio work. I like to be able to say to people, “You should try this too!”

--Kim Bennett

Amy Sillman at SFAI, Crown Point Press

O & N, Amy Sillman 2007

Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman gave an artist talk at San Francisco Art Institute Monday night and on Tuesday night, her show Amy Sillman: New Etchings, opened at Crown Point Press.

There were ecstatic fans, like Jarrett Arnest, pictured below in his own homemade AMY SILLMAN t-shirt (complete with glitter) who said, "If people show up for Britney Spears in their fan shirts, somebody better do it for Amy Sillman."

Jarrett Arnest at the San Francisco Art Institute Lecture

Between the talk at SFAI and the new work at Crown Point, Sillman has offered San Francisco a well lighted window into her process. In her choice of slides at SFAI (and she did use slides) Sillman showed everything. She was kind of on fire - she offered us extra large helping of her interests and influences. For influences she mentioned David Hammons, Jean Arp, Joan Jonas, Louise Bourgeois, Phillip Guston, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Rachel Harrison, Martin Kippenberger, Jutta Koether --

She said, "You know how sometimes you're at a party and somebody says something that effects you for the rest of your life? Well - this guy said 'At the end of the century things get smooth and fussy and at the beginning everything gets chopped up and rough.' I was like YEAH I wanna be part of that!"

The opening at Crown Point Press on Tuesday was packed, and the visitors were thrilled with the unusual opportunity this show offers to see proofs as well as finished prints.

Visitors: Artist Julie Mehretu and San Francicso Art Institute's Brett Reichman

Linda Geary and Mari Andrews with Sillman Proofs

Since this is a blog post, I should mention that Sillman was emphatic in her talk that painting must be encountered in person. She said "IT - WON'T - GO- THROUGH - THE - INTERNET." So come out and see her work IN PERSON. The show at Crown Point Press runs through December 29, 2007.