(Re)Print: Jordan Schnitzer Gallery, Print Center New York

The ten etchings of First Flight (2015) by Lynette Yiadom Boakye are sepia colored portrait studies of Black men wearing the feathered ruff collars that are a staple of the artist’s descriptive lexicon. Yiadom-Boakye invokes the history of European portraiture conventions through a serialized format of representation. Her invented, composite subjects are contrasted with an engraving by the 17th century Flemish artist Anthony Van Dyck, which neatly embodies the portrait tradition that Yiadom-Boake s work both pushes against and critically interprets. 

Throughout his practice, Mark Bradford has transformed mass-produced “merchant posters (brightly colored posters that target a neighborhood s lower income residents) salvaged from the streets of South Los Angeles. A series of etchings made in 2012 use recycled copper plates and test the legibility of their source material. Also on view is a mixed media collage that directly incorporates Bradford s found materials, drawing attention to the social and economic systems that shape communities and the issues of class, race and gender that lie beneath. 

Enrique Chagoya’s nearly eight-foot codex El Popol Vuh de la Abuelita del Ahuizote (The Community Book of King Ahuizote’s Granny) (2021) derives from a wide range of reference material—from US comic books to pre-Columbian imagery that the artist uses to generate surreal narrative juxtapositions. Combining layers of acrylic ink and varnish on amate, the bark paper used in pre Columbian codices, this work typifies Chagoya s incisive practice of reverse anthropology, rearranging cultural icons to intervene in collective memory and history making. 

Cecily Brown’s intimate etchings from 2004 are inquiries into images made by the print satirist and social critic William Hogarth, with whom Brown has engaged through a sustained practice of looking and studying. Brown transforms three of Hogarth s engravings from his renowned series A Rake’s Progress (1735) and Four Prints of an Election (1755), reinterpreting their composition and linework. Brown breaks apart Hogarth s tight, theatrical compositions into comparatively loose approximations of space and form that linger between figuration and abstraction, all while managing to capture the debauchery, conflict and humor of the original moral narratives.

In Layered Portraits (After Lucian Freud) (2008), Glenn Brown critically engages the paradigm of artists making copies of old masters, focusing specifically on the printed book as a medium that has shaped art history. Brown obfuscates etchings by the British 20th century portraitist Lucian Freud, altering and layering images that he scanned from exhibition catalogs before then printing them in dense composites of up to 16 images per print. Also on view are three works that Brown appropriates, Freud’s Kai (1991–92), Girl with Fuzzy Hair (2004) and Woman with an Arm Tattoo (1996).

By closely juxtaposing prints with original source material, (Re)Print demonstrates the fundamental importance that appropriation and historical revision have played for each of these artists. The exhibition is accompanied by a roster of public programming and a modest publication featuring an essay by guest writer Gillian Forrester, formerly Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art.