In 1969 Bernard Jacobson began his career as an art dealer, selling and publishing prints by important contemporary artists from a small fourth-floor gallery in London’s Mayfair. For a gallery founded on printmaking and which continues to stage major print shows by artists including Matisse and Motherwell, what better way could there be to celebrate this half century than a two-part exhibition devoted to printmaking?
2019 opens with Jacobson’s personal selection of important work from 6 centuries of printmaking, ‘Prints I wish I had Published’ and now moves on to a selection of some of the highlights of the prints Jacobson did publish during his long career – and what a selection it is. When Jacobson began in 1969, printmaking was enjoying an explosion of interest and was a medium of choice for a whole generation of artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including Andy Warhol and Peter Blake. Jacobson found himself entirely in the right place at the right time and this exhibition is a glorious journey through the five decades which were to follow.
Screenprinting dominates the earlier works here and it was a process particularly fitted to the aesthetic of the 60s and 70s; it delivers flat, bold washes of colour and was perfect for rendering the simplified photographic images at the heart of both the Pop and Photorealist movements prevalent at the time. Malcolm Morley’s photorealist Horses by (1969) was the first print to be published by the gallery and was created by an artist variously described as the best painter of his generation (Salvador Dali) and as “the last wild man of modern art” (Robert Hughes). This pastoral depiction of a foal with his mare in an impossibly verdant setting has something altogether unsettling about it; the green overheated – the sunshine as it radiates down on the horses, almost nuclear.
| Duration | 13 February 2019 - 09 March 2019 |
| Times | Monday - Friday: 10am - 6pm Saturday: 11am - 2pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Bernard Jacobson Gallery |
| Address | 8 Golden Square, London, W1F 9HY |
| Contact | 4402077343431 / mail@jacobsongallery.com / www.jacobsongallery.com |