Prints

For this year’s Summer Show, Sadie Coles HQ presents editions by four of the gallery’s artists: John Currin, Angus Fairhurst, Urs Fischer and Elizabeth Peyton.

John Currin’s exquisitely worked series of seven etchings, Milestones, 2006, are based on a selection of paintings spanning the artist’s career to date, and exemplify the artist’s skill in this technique and in depicting the figure in a variety of twisted circumstances. Many of the etchings ooze mischievous humour: a scantily-dressed ‘hobo’, with strappy platform sandals and a pack on her back, smiles mysteriously as she is surrounded by fat snow-flakes. In another, a doctor crouches rather forcefully on a doctor’s stool, brandishing a stethoscope toward the patient hidden by a screen, over which a bra dangles suggestively. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Currin depicts the pathos of a woman seemingly forced into her bed, staring fixedly into the space above her.

In Elizabeth Peyton’s new prints, she portrays a beautifully majestic Georgia O’Keefe, a young kaftan-wearing Ozzy Osbourne, the artist Nick Mauss and a red hot Julian Casablancas caught in action with the Strokes. Peyton experiments with a range of printing techniques to quite different painterly effect. All the works share the sincerity and compassion that characterize her paintings and drawings.

In a series of three works, each titled Unprinted, Angus Fairhurst extends into print recent collages using layered magazine advertisements with the figures and text removed. In so doing he subverts the original appearance and intent of these images, and creates new semi-abstract forms in the process.

Thinking about Störtebeker, Urs Fischer’s portfolio of prints, brings together edgily funny and brazen imagery to create bizarre visual puns. Combining drawings, collage and digital editing, Fischer’s prints depart from the usual expectations of space, scale and context. In one print, lips open to reveal an eye, around whose edge smoke flows; in another a table casts the elongated shadow of a wooden garden chair; another shows a middle-aged Fischer holding a cat the size of a lion. The juxtapositions within the group capture Fischer’s characteristic trait of making unexpected images whose cleverly worded titles offer an additional layer of meaning.

Pressetext

Prints
John Currin, Angus Fairhurst, Urs Fischer, Elizabeth Peyton