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.

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).