In its 43 years, Studio Prints had a huge influence on the art world. The London-based studio facilitated the work of Frank Auerbach, Leucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and hundreds more. At its inception it was the first and only intaglio print studio in London, which meant it offered a place for experimentation, but also commercialisation.
Hosted by University of Liverpool’s Victoria Gallery & Museum, this mixed wall & cabinet exhibition shares an important archive of a powerful studio, and the impact it had on the art world at a time when artists found celebrity easily, but identity harder to pin down.
During a boom in commercial art markets, a narrative across the art world that art was for everyone but priced for the few, and a passion to reinforce ideals of the Arts & Crafts movement in making a commodity of art, the 1960s must have been a confusing time to be an artist. The hypocrisy barely made sense to them, so god knows how it came across to audiences.
Anyway, driven by a genuine desire to establish actual, tangible creative strokes in print and reproduction, these artists, led by Dorothea Wight and, later, Marc Balakjian, set out to create something that genuinely meant their buyers could hold something with the true energy of their original sketches.
That meant experiments with the weights of pressure on paper, of hardness of pencil, pen or charcoal; how effectively scratches could come across, or dust and expressions that made their work theirs.
The studio leaders led these experiments, striving to perfect methods of reproducing mark making. Today, intaglio print is well understood but rarely executed with the same passion. We’re more concerned with colour reproduction and making digital print feel more alive, when even the most passionate digital printer is probably hoping enough paying traffic would ask for traditional prints. But it’s not affordable now and it probably wasn’t cheap then.
What it was, was a route to genuinely energetic reproductions, that felt like artworks in their own right.
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Making a Mark: The Studio Prints Collection is open at Victoria Gallery & Museum until 30th January 2027
Words, Kathryn Wainwright
