January Issue 2000
Millennium Prints in the Fine Print Room at Hodges Taylor Gallery
The passing of a millennium is the subject of several new prints in the Fine Print Room at Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, NC. Artists Peter Milton from NH and Enrique Chagoya from CA will test your memory of history in several new extraordinary intaglio prints while offering a bit of humor.
Twentieth Century Limited by Peter Milton depicts a massive train disaster and rescue operation in the former Pennsylvania Station in New York City. Over thirty references to artists and well known art works from the twentieth century appear in the etching. Marcel Duchamp flees the wreckage with parts of The Large Glass. Both Magritte's subjects from Ceci n'est pas une pipe and Dali's giraffes are in flame. Search and find Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Louise Bourgeois, as well as works by Warhol, Giacometti, Bacon and a crate full of Picassos.
Mexican artist Enrique Chagoya has recently completed a remarkable print combining woodcut, color lithography and chine colle. Les Adventures des Cannibales Modernistes (The Adventures of the Modernist Cannibals) depicts encounters of the French with Mexican, Aztec and Mayan cultures. The print, based upon a pre-Columbian book or 'codex' is presented as an accordion folded book and juxtaposes appropriated engravings, medical illustrations, and comic book characters in surprising interpretations of North and Central American history.
Both of these well known graphic artists are not as visible in the Southeast as they should be. Milton is a major twentieth-century intaglio artist creating distinctive and complex etchings for over three decades. Details included in the prints result from lengthy research. Writer John Fowles thinks of them, "rather less as prints than as novels." Twentieth Century Limited is the third in a series of four prints titled Points of Departure. Mary's Turn, is a study of comparisons and contrasts between Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. The image of the artists in a game of billiards is concerned with the ending of the nineteenth century. A second in the series, Nijinsky Variations, is an extravagant print depicting myriad personalities associated with Nijinsky and serves as a look a the first half of the twentieth century. Twentieth Century Limited takes us through the latter half of the century complete with the chaos and tumult of the art world. A more intimate print, Pavane, is inspired by images by Hungarian photographer Andre Kertesz and serves as the conclusion to the series and to the millennium.
Enrique Chagoya was born in Mexico and came to the US in the 1970's. He is well represented on the west coast but can be seen in major collections in the east such as Museum of Modern art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Believing the twentieth century to be perhaps the most violent in the world's history, Chagoya uses prints, painting, and drawing to create non-linear narratives with many possible interpretations. His codex books, in his own works, "are based on the idea that history is told by those who win wars. Previous historic accounts are erased, destroyed or buried in oblivion... The world is endlessly remapped and renamed."
These prints by Milton and Chagoya are featured in Millennium Prints in the Fine Print Room at Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte. Other prints by both artists are available for viewing on request.
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