Larry Scholder: Retrospective
MAY 17 - AUGUST 24, 2013
Opening Reception Larry Scholder: June 21 - Closing Reception August 23 6 until 8 PM
Archive represents nearly twenty years of Larry Scholder’s work as an artist/printmaker. The work constitutes a retrospective of his developing vision during this time. Archive was first mounted at the Pollock Gallery of the Meadows School of Art at Southern Methodist University, where it was exhibited in the fall of 2012. Scholder served as professor at SMU from 1968 until 2012. In 1994, Flatbed published one of Scholder’s prints as a part of the Flatbed Portfolio and since that time, he has continued to work with Flatbed on various intaglio projects.
The relief and intaglio prints created over the past twenty years of his career show Scholder’s conscious use of limitations in scale and color, choosing to make most images in a 10 x 8 inch format. This scale most fits his way of drawing and mark making, and the viewer needs to be as close to it as to a printed page. His use of restraint extends to his use of black and white or monochromatic color. Both of these limitations give him free rein with his mark making. The marks, the shapes, the voids create small intimate worlds of lines and shapes. Each finished work feels like important bit of conversation. Lines interact with lines the way well chosen words sit in the air. Some juxtaposition of shapes suggests jumbled and crowded spaces full of animated voices, and in others the repetitions seem orchestrated into a lyrical cacophony. Scholder has said that “one of the advantages of working the same size and same proportion of rectangle is...you know what your hand can do and the kind of marks you can make and what the edges are going to do.”
Scholder uses two primary ways of making the prints: relief etching and intaglio. The relief etchings are often created with polymer plates and printed on a Vandercook letterpress. These prints use high contrast shapes or lines. Some of the more recent prints created with the polymer plates have their origin in collages that the artist creates and transfers to the polymer plates. The intaglio prints, which have a fluid and atmospheric quality were created at Flatbed and make use of copper plates and the aquatint technique etched with hand-applied acid.
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Before |
Pluto II |
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Prelude |
Swarm III |
Surge |
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Eclipse |
Gaze |
