John Baldessari
Louise Bourgeois
Eric Fischl
Alfredo Jaar
Alex Katz
Kimsooja
Yukinori Yanagi

Peter Blum Edition is pleased to be participating in the IFPDA Print Fair. The presentation includes highlights from over four decades of the print publisher's editions, demonstrating the collaborative process between artist, printer, and publisher that result in singular multiples.

Click here for visiting information.

"...Perhaps what's most interesting about this pair of prints is that Baldessari resorts to a piece of conventional Christian iconography for his depiction of Hell, while he offers a more personal vision of Heaven. The presence of the Coppo di Marcovaldo mosaic from the ceiling of the Baptistery in Florence is also noteworthy because it is one of the few non-photography-based images in Baldessari's oeuvre."

— Raphael Rubinstein on Heaven and Hell

"My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama."

— Louise Bourgeois on Autobiographical Series

"This is a subject which is recurrent. There is a kind of disassociation between what the girl thinks...that is, what she wishes...and what she appears to be. What she wishes is to be a goody-goody...but the document reveals that her deeper mind is on something completely different! What you are and what you are not are intertwined.”

— Louise Bourgeois on Champfleurette, the White Cat

"You can fool with your spirals...you can have fun with them. The spiral becomes your friend. You can hide something inside.”

— Louise Bourgeois on To Hide

“Fischl was dissatisfied with a painting and painted a white shape in it, which he then realized was a bed. ‘I never understood it, but I knew it was done,’ he has said. ‘Then years later that bed started to appear and reappear until its presence became clarified to me.’ The bed image would play a crucial role in Fischl's mature work, which took the dysfunctionality of American suburban life as its primary context.”

— Vincent Katz on Eric Fischl

"Nelson Mandela is released from prison, after 28 years of brutal treatment by the apartheid regime. The images of his release, broadcast live around the world, show a man squinting into the light as if blinded. More than half of Mandela's sentence was spent on Robben Island, a windswept rock surrounded by the treacherous seas of the Cape of Good Hope. Only seven miles off Cape Town, the island had been used as a maximum security prison for 'non-white' men since 1959. Mandela later said that Robben Island was 'intended to cripple us so that we should never again have the strength and courage to pursue our ideals.'"

— David Levi Strauss on Alfredo Jaar's The Sound of Silence

"But the more one looks at his block prints the more their commonality with his painting is evident. He avoids transparency in them, just as he never uses glazes in his canvases. Flat expanses of tone and balances of positive with void are recurrent in his paintings too, along with a tendency to simplification and summation of movement and form. Many of his procedures as an artist have a hands-on physicality not unlike that of relief print."

— Merlin James on Katz's block prints

"I did have one specific idea of what I wanted to do with Alex in that first project, and it was to ask him to do woodcuts. One of the reasons to choose the woodcut medium was to pursue something within Alex's work which fascinated me, which had a rougher, more raw, quality than some of the prints he had done, which were much closer to the paintings and other unique work."

— Peter Blum on Katz's woodcuts

"I suddenly had this intense desire, this urge to cut into wood or linoleum, but I didn't have any blocks or tools. So, I went to the local supply store in Camden [Maine] where I bought the kind of print kit intended for the beginner or the sixth-grade art class student who wants to learn how to cut a linoleum block. I went to work fast and furiously and couldn't stop until I had used up all the blocks."

— Alex Katz on Landscape

"Printed works are of crucial importance within Katz’s oeuvre. It is the medium in which he reproduces, reflects, and reduces his motifs in further stages, using mainly ideas from his paintings and cut-outs."

— Klaus Albrecht Schroder on Katz's prints

"The Seven Wishes consists of large Iris Prints of the fabrics traditionally given to newlyweds in Korea. The images illustrate the wishes for newlyweds at traditional Korean wedding ceremonies, such as purses for prosperity and turtles for longevity. The traditional Korean fabrics, which are a repeated symbol in Kimsooja’s work since the early 1990s, are wedding bedspreads and are also used to wrap newborn babies. At death, they are used to wrap the body for burial."

— MIT List Visual Arts Center on The Seven Wishes

“The boundaries that ants cannot recognize – their inability is intimated by densely drawn red lines that trace their repeated movements toward the metal bars – are not only physical borders but also a metaphor for the 'imaginary boundaries' that regulate human behavior. Therein, the ants’ predicament parallels the existential condition of humans.”

— Reiko Tomii on Wandering Position