By Katerina Kyselica | Welcome to our fourth volume of Celebrating Print. This double issue contains comprehensive surveys of projects by three renowned artists: Dora Maurer (Hungary), Victor Hulik (Slovakia) and Bojan Golija (Slovenia). I hope you will become bedazzled by the extent of Dora Maurer’s experimentation realized through a classic printmaking technique, intaglio. Art historian Emese Revesz elucidates Maurer’s conceptions rooted in transmutation and action. Such free play also appears in Viktor Hulik’s practice. Eva Trojanova notes that “as Hulik endeavors to visually seize heterogeneity, continuous transformation and variability, his search never binds him to one medium.” Fixation over the visual effects of printmaking defined Bojan Golija’s enterprises, as examined thoroughly by Breda Skrjanec.
Viktor Hulik, Projection – Rotor II, 1984 (view of a rotating variant), offset print, crumple-age, relief collage, metal bearing on board, 17 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches (45 x 45 cm), unique, photograph by Martin Marencin.
In addition, Dorota Folga-Januszewska expands the discourse on printed matter by looking into poster as an autonomous art form. Considering the impact that the design of an image has on its perception, I have invited four artists—Endi Poskovic, Eva Hnatova, Jelena Petrovic and Zuzana Ruzickova—to expose their inner ruminations as they assess different technologies to best express their ideas. At last, Barbara Kalwajtys, director of the Baruch Foundation, tells the story of collectors Anne and Jacques Baruch, whose perseverance allowed many Eastern Bloc artworks to end up in American museum collections.
Over the summer, I attended the 2018 International Print Triennial Krakow. Whilst visiting Grzegorz Banaszkiewicz’s Laboratory of Graphic Imagining, I became rapt by the effects of presented devices—stereoscopes and such—that revealed images moving, growing in size or appearing in illusionary depth. All were small in scale, scattered throughout the staged studio and, akin to the traditional print, required an intimate approach to seeing.
Experiencing this rather historical version of virtual reality confirmed to me the urgency to discuss (and present) printmaking in its entirety, not as a confluence of analog versus digital, but as a printmaking ideology behind each project (the term used by Breda Skrjanec in this issue) or a printmaking way of thinking (as Dorota Folga-Januszewska explained in our Volume 2, no. 1).
I may honestly state that, in the seven issues of Celebrating Print Magazine, we have comprehensively accredited diverse methods of printmaking together with open approaches to the medium. Unfortunately, Volume 4 shall be our final edition.
I would like to express my sincerest thanks to the supportive readers of the publication. My gratitude also extends to the contributors who joined me throughout these years, volunteering their time and knowledge. The magazine has operated on a shoestring budget; this last issue would not exist without the financial contribution by Mr. Richard Polsky. I would like to honor his belief in my resolution to document the development of Central and Eastern European printmaking and leave a permanent record in art libraries. I also very much appreciate the relentless efforts of our article editor, Tanya Silverman, in ensuring the quality of the English texts whose manuscripts are sourced from various languages. It was a great pleasure for me to lead this team effort.
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