Artists include: The Atlas Group, Polly Apfelbaum, Fiona Banner, Peter Blake, Sonia Boyce, Leonie Bradley, Christian Noelle Charles, Tracey Emin, Ruth Ewan, Ellen Gallagher, Richard Hamilton, Hastings and Quinlan, Lubaina Himid, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Yinka Ilori, R.B Kitaj, Lakwena, Liliane Lijn, Julian Opie, Ciara Phillips, Quinlan and Hastings, Robert Rauschenberg, Eric Ravilious, Paula Rego, Larry Rivers, Deiter Roth, Ed Ruscha, Ben Sanderson, Khadije Saye, Shanzai Lyric, Yinka Shonibare, George Shaw, Sin Wai Kin, Emma Stibbon, Graham Sutherland, Joe Tilson, Mark Wallinger, Andy Warhol, Jeremy Wood and Lu Williams.
For this exhibition, over 60 works have been retrieved from across the 290 hectares of the University. For staff and students, its an opportunity to see familiar works in an unfamiliar context and to see new works that have been in buildings they have never visited. For visitors, it’s an opportunity to display the breadth and significance of the University’s Art Collection on its 60th anniversary. We chose to examine prints since they form the largest group by media in the Art Collection.
The artist Joseph Beuys wrote that “prints are ideas in circulation”. The works that were bought for the Art Collection in the early years were international in scope and relentlessly modern. A significant group are “the American prints”. In 1964, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Art Museum in Connecticut USA commissioned ten screenprints by ten painters. The curator, Sam Wagstaff, said that he wanted people 'to get as big a hunk of the current aesthetic as they could, as cheaply as possible'. This comment shows the importance of the modern world, particularly the American world, to people and how printmaking made it accessible.
To carry on this tradition, we have commissioned a print from artist Ben Sanderson to mark the 60th anniversary of the University. Ben Sanderson grew up in Coventry. He now lives and works as an artist in Cornwall. Ben writes,
This four-plate photopolymer etching was made in St Erth, Cornwall with Master Printmaker Simon Marsh. The first plate is printed in ochre, blue and green (a cove, a sky, a field). Abstracted forms come from the second plate which uses hexagonal templates for a patchwork quilt, started by my mother when she was eighteen. The templates are made from old Christmas cards and envelopes from her part time job at Dunlop. Plates three and four dance around a watery border, restlessly sprouting new growth. Gestures break out of the edges of previous plate lines, as they jump and fall into the open space that surrounds the image.
Placing Place, 2024
four plate polymer etching edition of 60 57cm x 76cm
