OnTheTown: The work of more than 50 living printmakers from the US went on view at Dublin's Graphic Studio Gallery this week.
"People printed what was around them. It has a sense of industrialisation. A lot looks like the docks," said painter Brian Gormley, who opened the show. The printmakers in the show are all represented in New York by the Old Print Shop, which has been in existence for 108 years.
"It's in midtown Manhattan," said Gormley, who grew up on Lexington Avenue, across the street from the Old Print Shop. "I remember it growing up. I remember seeing the prints in the window."
The work in the show "is a product of the industrial, urban metropolis", he added. The printmakers "are carrying on the tradition. People have gone back to the basics. Printing has not changed since Dürer".
The collection contains "lots of urban imagery because that's what sells in New York", said painter, printmaker and former president of the Society of American Graphic Artists Michael Di Cerbo, who is one of the printmakers in the show.
"There are some figurative [images] -. it's everything," he added, pointing to work by Peter Gourfain and Robert Kipniss as examples of the range of work.
Some of the prints "are investigating a different perspective on architecture", said gallery manager Catherine O'Riordan. "It's an urban landscape. It's a different subject matter. It's refreshing."
Among those at the opening were artists Brian Henderson and Gay O'Neill, who was with her sister-in-law, Hallfridur O'Neill; Jo and John Bligh, from Ranelagh, Dublin; and Brian Lalor, chair of the board of the Graphic Studio, Dublin, and editor of The Encyclopaedia of Ireland. Di Cerbo's Irish cousins, Barry Browne and Kevin Casley, were at the opening also.
The Old Print Shop New York exhibition continues at the Graphic Studio Gallery, off Cope Street in Dublin's Temple Bar, until Sat, Sept 2