Glasgow Print Studio: Kelvingrove exhibition review

THE Glasgow Print Studio celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. As this excellent exhibition attests, it has, in those five decades, been responsible for an extraordinary array of brilliant images.

Given the ubiquity of the mass reproduced image – from the pages of newspapers and magazines, to advertising hoardings and, in recent times, the internet – the art of printing can be overlooked.

Yet printing, as an art form, is as old as Chinese woodcut printing (which began around 700 CE) and as modern as digital technology (which has been embraced by no less a painter than David Hockney).

As we can see in the Kelvingrove exhibition, the members and associated artists of the Print Studio have created work in every form of printing, from woodcuts, to etchings and screenprints.

The list of artists who have created work at the Studio reads like a veritable Who’s Who of modern Scottish art.

Any art gallery in the world would be blessed to present a show that included works by the likes of John Bellany, Elizabeth Blackadder, Christine Borland, John Byrne, Steven Campbell, Ken Currie, Alasdair Gray, Peter Howson, Jim Lambie, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ciara Phillips, Alison Watt and Adrian Wiszniewski.

This exhibition is simultaneously a fabulous testament to the vitality and diverse excellence of the Print Studio and an unarguable statement (if it were needed) of the impressiveness of Scotland’s visual artists in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This is a wonderfully substantial show, taking up the entirety of Kelvingrove’s large basement exhibition space. Some images – such as Byrne’s enigmatic lithograph The American Boy (1999) – will be familiar to many art lovers.

Others – such as the works by Bellany, Blackadder and Howson – will be instantly recognisable from their distinctive styles (which are as specific as a signature, regardless of the art form in question). Wiszniewski’s screenprint titled simply Poet (1986) is a delightful case in point.

The artist’s archetypal human figure – unique to him, but not observably a figure of self-portraiture – reclines dreamily, nature and culture surrounding him as colourfully and vigorously as in any of the artist’s paintings.

By contrast, Currie’s etchings Drinking Session in a Highland Hunting Lodge (2015) and Donnafugata (2018) testify to the extraordinary, bleak power of the artist’s interiors.

Blackadder’s expressively varied cats are a joy while Watt’s screenprint Shoal (2013) is a characteristically beautiful work of almost transcendental subtlety.

Harry Magee’s Towards the Light (2022) is a darkly evocative Glasgow cityscape that contrasts with Seher Shah’s works of architectural abstraction, which would have been worthy of the Bauhaus.

One could create hundreds upon hundreds of such juxtapositions, such is the delicious variety of the exhibition.

The show ranges from birds and plants, to landscapes, seascapes, human portraits and works of humour and satire.

From pieces made for galleries to book covers and theatre posters, the exhibition is a glorious celebration of the possibilities of the art of printing.

The Love of Print runs at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow until March 12: glasgowlife.org.uk