Silvia Massa

THE NEWS CORNER #52

Some museums and libraries have reopened their doors and we are all looking forward to admiring art on paper on view again in exhibitions, and to studying precious sheets in print rooms. Here is a selection of online events and further study or communication material that have been made available over the past weeks.

The IFPFA Fine Art Print Fair, the largest international art fair devoted to printmaking, was originally scheduled to be held in New York. It has moved online and it’s happening here, until 13 June 2020.

With the exhibition Pushing paper: contemporary drawings from 1970 to now, the British Museum challenges our notion of drawing. To organise this show, the first devoted to contemporary art on paper, curators at the British Museum worked together with curators in other cultural institutions as well as galleries around the UK. This blog article brings us behind the scenes, explains how the drawings were chosen and guides us through the current themes in contemporary drawing which are explored in the exhibition. The exhibition, originally planned to tour several cities, is currently closed: but you can explore here some online resources related to it.

Another little explored topic is presented in the exhibition A Graphic Revolution: Prints and Drawings in Latin America at the Cleveland Museum of Art, James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery | Gallery 101. As explained here, the focus is laid on the museum’s collection of works on paper produced in Latin America over the past century.

Exceptional works from the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen will be presented to the public for the very first time in the exhibition Am Anfang war die Zeichnung. Formen und Funktionen seit der Renaissance, which showcases the various functions performed by drawings. Enjoy here a short video-presentation by the curator Dr. Christine Demele.

The Fourth Annual Symposium of Master Drawings, "Master Drawings: Then and Now!”, hosted a talk by Rosie Razzall, winner of the Second Annual Ricciardi Prize, who presented her winning work "Copying Gainsborough: Paul Sandby, Sharing, Sociability and Self-fashioning". A video is available here.

Those who work on history of the book and incunabola will enjoy the website of the project La digitalizzazione degli incunaboli delle biblioteche monastiche in Italia. The project is run by Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Consoium of European Reasearch Libraries (CERL) and The Polonsky Foundation. It will bring online the incunabola housed in Italian monastic libraries, starting with those annexed to national monuments.

New CFP now open: the Italian journal for art on paper, «Grafica d’arte», has just launched its new call. Among the topics proposed there are some very actual one such as epidemics, hospitals, doctors and nurses, and iconographic analysis of indifference. Deadline for submissions: 28 March 2021. If you are curious to see how the journal looks like on the inside, you can have a look here. And here you can find the list of published volumes, with table of contents for each one of them.