It is a pleasure for us to be holding this exhibition entitled A Wonderland of Prints: Look, Learn, Study, and Experience at Yokosuka Museum of Art.
No doubt many of you have experienced making a woodcut in an art lesson at school. You draw a design, transfer it onto a block of wood, engrave it with a graver, place the ink on the block, and print it on paper. Monochrome woodcuts are one of the printing techniques we are most familiar with. Yet, there are not so many opportunities to find out how prints other than woodcuts are made. Woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, silkscreens…there are a variety of prints, but what are the differences? How are they produced? Have you ever wondered what these different kinds are all about?
Through prints from our own collection and those on loan from other institutes and individuals, this exhibition introduces the techniques in printmaking. Rather than featuring them as reproductions as opposed to hand-painted originals, we have focused on the engraving (platemaking) and printing, which are processes characteristic of printmaking. Together with the prints, there are also displays of related materials that you may not be able to come across so often such as the original block or plate used to print a work, proofs, and variations of the same image printed in different colors.
Polychrome woodblock prints such as ukiyo-e, large-size woodcuts combining multiple woodblocks to create a large image, photopolymer gravures, for which the matrix is made from a photograph, and monotypes, in which only one impression can be printed from one plate, are a few examples of works filled with the artists’ techniques and fastidious attention. There are also publications such as kawaraban (Edo period newssheets) or maps and prints that developed into picture books or commercial designs. We hope the world of prints full of surprises presented here will prove an opportunity for you to rediscover the richness and diversity of printmaking.