David Krut Projects Johannesburg (DKP) presents Carved, a group exhibition of woodcut and linocut relief prints made in the David Krut Print Workshop (DKW) at Arts on Main.

In relief printing the artist sketches a composition on a block of material and then cuts away pieces from the surface, leaving a raised area which will receive the ink.  A roller is then used to apply ink to this raised surface and the image transferred to paper with a press or by hand burnishing or rubbing.  Since the recessed, cut-away areas do not receive ink, they appear white on the printed image.  Relief prints are characterized by bold dark-light contrasts and an impress into the paper of the inked lines.  The primary relief techniques are woodcut and linocut.

Woodcut is the earliest and most enduring of all print techniques, in which a block of wood is used as the matrix. While woodcuts were first seen in ninth-century China, Western artists have been making woodcut prints since the fourteenth century. They were originally conceived as religious icons and sold as souvenirs of a pilgrimage to holy sites. Woodcut soon became a popular medium for the mass distribution of religious and instructive imagery in Europe, not least through books since, with the invention of movable type, the woodblock matrix could be set in the same press with the text and both text and image printed together. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, woodcuts were developed in Japan to an exceptional level of artistic achievement, known as the ukiyo-e period or style.

Linocuts are printed from a linoleum tile.  The linoleum is handled in exactly the same way as a wood block but, since it does not have a wood grain, the surface of the resulting print will have less texture.  The material takes all types of lines but is most suited to large designs with contrasting tints.

Carved showcases work by a large selection of artists including Godfried Donkor, Senzo Shabangu, Maja Maljevi?, Mary Wafer, William Kentridge, Jürgen Partenheimer, Cannonball Press, Robyn Penn, Chris Cozier, Stephen Hobbs, Nathaniel Sheppard and Chad Cordeiro.

OPENING RECEPTION: 5 February at 6pm

Senzo Shabangu will also present a printmaking demonstration at 11:00 on Saturday 21 February at David Krut Bookstore, 151 Jan Smuts Avenue, to offer visitors insight into the creating of linocut prints.

http://davidkrutprojects.com