HP Editions is Pleased to Announce New Publications

HP Editions is pleased to announce new publications from collaborations with Santiago Cucullu, Lisa Nankivil, Todd Norsten, Chloe Piene, and David Rathman.

Santiago Cucullu and several HP Editions staff produced a beautiful suite of 7 prints during the Mid-America Print Conference in Fargo, North Dakota, in late 2008. Printed in silver ink on black Plinke paper, the prints reference Cucullu’s stay in Berlin during the summer of 2008, including manipulated buildings built shortly after the fall of the wall, and contemporary anti-fascist graffiti.

Lisa Nankivil’s project began at our Lyndale Avenue location fall 2008 and was completed in the new printshop at 912 Lake Street West. Over the course of several months, she created a vivid photolithograph that continues with the striped configuration of Lacuna and Equinox, her first Highpoint publications. The new print (as yet untitled) is larger than her previous works and its red and green bands reveal more of the watery blue underlayers. Nankivil has also scattered tiny dots across the page, which generates a sense of movement and lends the piece a pleasing, whimsical tone.

Todd Norsten finished out a Highpoint Editions stay at the old space by completing two wonderful prints this February that display his keen sense of ironic (sardonic) wit, combined with a high level of attention to technique and exacting balance. One is a masterful trompe l’oeil screen print that appears to be masking tape applied to a sheet of paper to spell out the phrase “Endless, Ceaseless, Boundless, Joy”. The second titled “The trouble with romance” depicts a fallen snowman that almost blends into the wintery landscape — except for a trickle of blood coming from his head.

David Rathman returned to the printshop in June 2009. Those familiar with Highpoint will remember his Five New Etchings from 2005, a suite of intaglio prints featuring Western scenes and darkly humorous bits of text. One of his new prints is a muted spit bite etching that returns to this Western imagery. In it, two cowboys move through an austere landscape with the phrase “It seldom matters, the words you say” hovering in the space above them. A second etching combines spit bite, scraping, burnishing, roulette, and dry point work in a gritty image of two battered cars stacked in a junk yard with the words “The way we get by” floating above them. Rathman has also been busy with a large-scale diptych of demolition derby cars. Both vehicles are tiled into multiple prints, emphasizing their quirky, reconstructed quality.

Chloe Piene visited Highpoint Editions this September to continue work on etchings and lithographs she started back in her studio in Brooklyn. We are looking forward to announcing her completed projects soon.

New Collaborations at Highpoint Editions

Highpoint Editions is pleased to announce its recent collaboration with Mexican artist Carlos Amorales. HP Artistic Director and Master Printer Cole Rogers met Amorales in 2008, during a trip to Mexico City. Amorales’ Highpoint prints — which feature enigmatic groupings of his signature silhouettes — are a natural continuation of the artist’s previous work across such disciplines as sculpture, painting, dance, and music. For over a decade, Amorales has been gathering images of men, women, monkeys, skulls, airplanes, spiderwebs and other curiosities. He pulls the images from books, magazines, photographs and the Internet and simplifies their shapes through the process of rotoscoping, a technique used in early animation. The resulting set of imagery, which Amorales calls his Liquid Archive, has grown to include more than 1,500 digital drawings and provides the source material for his fascinating, cross-disciplinary practice. Highpoint will exhibit Amorales’ prints in a show scheduled for early 2010.