Skycatcher
Nicola López, 2026
intaglio with chine collé
Edition of 8
Image: 17 ¾ x 17 ¾ inches
Paper: 25 ½ x 25 inches
$1,900 unframed
Highpoint Editions is pleased to release Skycatcher, a new print by New Mexico-based artist Nicola López. In this ambitious intaglio print, the hybrid landscape depicted reflects the impact of human intervention alongside nature’s tenacious ability to adapt.
Nicola López’s work exists at the intersection of human-built environments and “Nature,” exploring how these two realms collide, echo, and intertwine. Her landscapes reconfigure, distort, and merge familiar worlds—urban, technological, botanical, and geological—to create spaces that are at once mysterious, disorienting, beautiful, and unsettling.
In Skycatcher, López reflects on her place within a complex and overwhelming, yet deeply cherished world, examining the nature and consequences of human “progress,” and imagining what resilience might look like amid profound change. The print points to the fragility of the world we inhabit and have helped build, while also highlighting its mystery and tenacious beauty.
The composition of the piece emulates a perspective one might encounter when looking upward through a tree’s canopy, where intertwining branches merge with skeletal architectural forms. The relationship between tree and structure remains intentionally ambiguous: it is unclear whether one grew around the other, whether the form emerged as a hybrid, or whether each began independently before becoming inextricably entangled.
The conceptual tension in López’s work mirrors her approach to process. From the outset of her collaboration with Highpoint Editions, López was intent on immersing herself fully in intaglio techniques—drawing on extensive prior experience while pushing the medium through rigorous technical exploration. She experimented broadly, combining methods and utilizing different processes to achieve deep, expressive marks alongside curving, natural figures. The image’s dark, industrial framework was created using aquatint to produce a dense, velvety black. Engraved lines were added to raise the paper’s surface, deepening the tonal presence and enhancing the texture, and areas within the tree branches were selectively burnished to introduce organic nuance.
The black silhouette divides the sky into discrete shapes, forming a net in which fragments of sky are framed, caught, or cradled. The sky feels alive—pulsing with varied, intense shades of blue—yet also appears as if it could be shattered, its shards suspended midfall. To achieve these lozenges of color, López used watercolor on an early proof to help decide which tones of blue to accentuate. After initial attempts using lithography and pochoir proved challenging, the final solution emerged in intaglio and five separate blue ink colors. The blue of the sky is expansive: the image’s foundation lies in a collé sheet adhered with tinted wheat paste, producing a subtle, atmospheric hue that could not be achieved through dye or pigment alone.
López working on a plate in the Highpoint Editions Studio
An early proof using a dyed chine collé sheet being cut to the size of the plate. This process created too dark and uneven of a tone in the sky.
López preparing a plate in the Highpoint Editions Studio
Every stage of Skycatcher’s development demanded meticulous attention, from the exacting marks made by López on the plate, to the complex inking and wiping process. The print’s substrate—Revere Polar White Suede— is now irreplaceable, as the Magnani mill was destroyed in an earthquake in 2016. The paper plays a crucial role in the print’s success, holding the engraved marks with exceptional clarity and depth.
Wiping of the copper plate after inking
Through both concept and process, the print embodies López’s ongoing exploration of the power of confrontation between nature and human-made systems: revealing beauty, vulnerability, and endurance in equal measure.
Nicola López examines and reconfigures contemporary landscapes through drawing, printmaking, site-specific installation, sculpture and video. Her work points to connections and rifts between our human-constructed world and the systems and cycles of nature. She engages architecture and urban structure as ever-accumulating evidence of human aspirations and failures, often contrasting and intertwining them with geological and organic formations. Her work draws on anthropology, architecture, urban planning and historical and fictional explorations of utopia/dystopia. It leans heavily into material process, intentionally bringing joy, improvisation, and care into the work as it reflects on human patterns of extraction and construction.
López has participated in several residencies and received grants and fellowships including a NYFA Fellowship in Drawing/Printmaking/Book Arts, a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, a Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is held in prominent institutional collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Denver Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, the Albuquerque Museum, and the Inside-Out Museum in Beijing.
