Contemporary Surfaces: Recent acquisitions – Prints

The Gothenburg Museum of Art’s collection of prints comprises some 50,000  works of which the eldest – an engraving by Master E.S. – is dated to about 1440. Such renowned names as Dürer, Rembrandt, Zorn and Munch are richly represented in the collection.

During this present century the museum has acquired an additional 403 works of graphic art, 152 of these by purchase and 251 through donations to the  museum. 148 of these works are by women artists and 255 by men. These recent acquisitions range from late 18th century Japanese woodcuts to Karin Mamma Andersson’s woodcut/lithograph “Absint” from 2010.

Several of the works in the exhibition express contemporary idiom and are characterised by the relationship of surface to the pictorial space and artistic techniques. Simple stark forms, as in Jacob Dahlgren’s trees and Marie-Louise Ekman’s female figure, contrast strongly with the richness of detail – both in image and text – of Tal R and Andreas Roth.The artworks of Jockum Nordström are frequently inhabited with strange figures, the very opposite of Karin Mamma Andersson’s solitary landscapes in which the absence of human presence is often striking.