Studio Prints. London Yale University (400296621)

This book focuses on the key role played by Studio Prints in the revival of interest in printmaking in the 1970s and 1980s in London and on the two understudied British artists who made it one of the foremost printmaking workshops for modern artists: Dorothea Wight (1944-2013) and Marc Balakjian (1940-2017). Dorothea Wight founded Studio Prints in London in 1968. Marc Balakjian, an artist and printmaker of Armenian origins, joined it in 1973. They married in the same year and for over 40 years have pursued their own artistic careers while also pulling prints for other artists. Thanks to their exceptional skills as master printmakers and to the sensibility with which they interpreted other artists’ ideas and intentions, during this long period of time Dorothea and Marc have emerged as leading printers for prominent artists like Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Paula Rego, Celia Paul, Kitaj, Stephen Conroy, Ken Kiff and many others, establishing close friendships and mutual relationships of trust and esteem. Using previously unpublished archival records and a substantial corpus of works by the above-mentioned artists, a group of distinguished contributors to the book provide insights on a thriving and pioneering season of artistic production in London and reveal a relatively un-recongnised but hugely influential hub of artistic production. This book also aims at shedding light on these two little-known artists, who have produced a remarkable body of works and have contributed significantly to fulfill the expressive ambitions of a vast number of artists through the medium of print. Among their achievements, the two artists have caused a revival of the long-abandoned technique of mezzotint, which they brought to an extremely high level of sophistication. Balakjian has made an extraordinary series of painted notebooks and several large-scale drawings which address the themes of memory, loss, and trauma. In her prints, Wight has pursued a subtle surrealist idiom, where interior and exterior spaces are confounded, producing images that convey a sense of intimacy but also destabilise the viewers’ point of view.