Marina Adams | Mamma Andersson | Virginia Overton

About

Opening reception: Friday, 17 January 2020, 6 – 9 pm

Exhibition: 18 January – 18 April 2020

New York-based painter Marina Adams, 2018 recipient of the Award of Merit Medal for Painting from the Academy of Arts and Letters, effortlessly translates her signature combinations of shapes and colours from canvas to printing plate. Adams’ artistic practice centers around the investigation of the relationship between color and form, often inspired by architectural shapes or textile design patterns. For Adams, these shapes and colour combinations constitute a mode of communication, which has the potential to cross borders and transcend the boundaries of language and culture.

Mamma Andersson combined woodcut and etching on Japanese paper in a series of three prints. After the printing process, she returned to one of the motives, a larger-than-life sculpture of a hand with raised index-finger, and hand coloured its finger nails individually, blurring the line between edition and unique work. Conceived as three autonomous images, Andersson began regarding the prints as a sort of triptych while working on them simultaneously. Her combination of drypoint, aquatint, and woodcut resulted in an intriguing series of complex prints with skillfully executed, multi-coloured surfaces which highlight the three-dimensionality of the depicted objects and give them an almost skin-like appearance. Although the artist has worked with a wide range of printing techniques, her first print project with BORCH Editions marked her first encounter with the drypoint technique. 

Much like her sculptural work, the nine prints by Virginia Overton are a direct response to her physical presence in a specific space—in this case, the city of Copenhagen and Niels Borch Jensen’s printmaking studio. Overton spent two weeks working with Borch Jensen and master printer Mette Ulstrup, allowing herself to delve into the process of print making and acquiring as much knowledge as possible of the different printing techniques. During her stay, she collected objects from places like flea markets and even the city streets, which she then incorporated into her works.