Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Emma Stibbon
Rare Prints
3 February until 20 April 2024
The exhibition Rare Prints brings together graphic works: woodcuts, silkscreens and lithographs.
Notable handprinted works are shown in public institutions like the New York Whitney Museum
of American Art and the London Royal Academy of Arts, but have only rarely been presented in
Germany. Starting with prints by pioneering American artists of the post-war era, Andy Warhol,
Roy Lichtenstein, and Cy Twombly, the exhibition also includes prints by contemporary British
artists Damien Hirst and Emma Stibbon.
Roy Lichtenstein’s work »IMPERFECT 67“ x 79 7/8“« plays with the ideal of geometrical balance
in asymmetric lines and exuberant triangular shapes: the ›imperfect‹ pictorial space changes
the seemingly harmonious ideal of abstraction.
In Andy Warhol’s screen print »Electric Chair« the artist’s personal ›signature‹ seems to disappear.
Warhol expresses the overpowering attraction of fear and death in an American symbol of
the ›Electric Chair‹. Cy Twombly’s graphic series, on the other hand, finds its associative field in
powerful, highly individual ciphers, a radically free form of signs consisting solely of ciphers and
the gesture of writing. Warhol’s and Twombly’s works embody extraordinary forms of expression
in printmaking, which stand in the most extreme contrast to one another.
In its fourteen-part cycle »The Stations of the Cross« Damien Hirst combines Christ’s Way with
the promise of salvation of modern medicine, to confront religion and science with one another
in striking images. Emma Stibbon’s four part »Caldera Overlook«, which was inspired by Japanese
prints, lets light intrude into the darkness of the endangered Rainforest in the Hawaii national
park, whose enchanting beauty is the centre of this depiction.
Rare Prints is the first exhibition of Bastian Gallery, which is exclusively dedicated to the
medium of printmaking. It follows the solo exhibitions of the gallery such as Cy Twombly’s
»Natural History« print cycle (2019), Picasso’s complete »Suite Vollard« (2014) and
Donald Judd’s woodcuts (2012).