Nancy Graves: Excavations in Print : A Catalogue Raisonne - Hardcover

Padon, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810933918 ISBN 13: 9780810933910

Publisher: Harry N Abrams Inc, 1996

Synopsis

Over the past twenty years, Nancy Graves has produced an extraordinarily varied body of work in an ever-expanding range of mediums, including painting, film, costume and set design, and print. In comparison to her painting and sculpture, Graves's prints have received little attention. This beautiful book illustrates Graves's entire graphic oeuvre and illuminates the artist's exacting concern for matters of form, material, and process.
In his essay, Thomas Padon offers an overview of Graves's printmaking activity and discusses the development of her complex visual language. In the interview with the author, Graves offers the first discussion of her specific interest in printmaking, her methodology, and the role of the medium in her overall oeuvre. The second half of the book constitutes a catalogue raisonne of Graves's graphic work, which comprises nearly 200 prints made at many of the leading printmaking workshops, including Tyler Graphics, Graphicstudio, and 2RC Edizioni d'Arte. Most of these works are published for the first time in this comprehensive volume.
Graves is unusually attuned to the phenomena of nature. A passionate interest in science led her to introduce unorthodox forms drawn from astronomy, botany, cartography, and zoology into her art. In the last decade, her intellectual pursuits have taken a more humanist course as she has recast world history into an enigmatic pictorial idiom. Graves has spoken of her desire to make art out of what she terms the "shards of art," and she has assembled a cache of images drawn from various disciplines, eras, and civilizations.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas Padon is Director of Exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts, New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

American artist Nancy Graves (1940-1995) made astonishing prints that, like her painting and sculpture, freely cross boundaries of mediums, disciplines and eras. This catalogue of an exhibition that will tour nationally is filled with images of arresting beauty. Graves's poetic lithographs based on geologic maps of Lunar Orbiter and Apollo landing sites signal her preoccupation with how information is visualized and transmitted. She creates primal metaphors based on Paleolithic cave paintings and, in Quipu, a filigree depiction of an ancient Andean knotted-string counting device, reclaims the spirit of the past. Other prints exuberantly combine biomorphic forms, art-historical allusions, geometric patterns and historical figures in ways that celebrate the continuum of history and the links between cultures. In his illuminating essay, Padon, a director at the American Federation of Arts, New York, sensitively explores a body of work open to multiple readings.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harry N Abrams Inc
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0810933918
• ISBN 13: 9780810933910
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 207