You will never know how happy I am: Exhibition of prints at Leicester Print Workshop from a residency.

Research output: Non-Textual OutputExhibition

Abstract

Michelle Keegan was introduced to Leicester Print Workshop’s archive of Suzanne Balkanyi’s etching plates, it resonated strongly with the work she was developing in response to loss and memorialisation. Balkanyi’s work is highly illustrative, the selection of plates were sophisticated portraits of animals and representational landscapes.
Keegan was curious about collaborating with the physical remnants of an artist’s practice to produce contemporary prints in honour of both practices as a way to bring additional meaning to the work. In many ways the etching plates hold printmaking secrets that are rarely seen. The result is over a hundred reiterated prints that bring new narratives and completely different abstract images from Balkanyi’s plates revisiting what already exists as an object without damaging the original etchings.
A piece about the exhibition has been published in Printmaking Today spring 2024
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 23 Mar 2024

Bibliographical note

Suzanne Balkanyi was born in Budapest in 1922. Towards the end of the second world war she was interned by the Nazis but she managed to escape and went into hiding until the end of the war. She came to Paris in 1947 where she studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. For many years she worked as a zoological illustrator at the (the Paris Zoo).

At weekends she drew and painted across Paris. In her vacations she travelled extensively in Brittany, Normandy and Provence, then Italy and eventually further afield, drawing and collecting material for her etchings. She showed regularly at the Salon of Drawings and Watercolours. Shortly before her death in 2005, she is recorded as saying, “No one will ever know how happy I have been.”

I was invited by Leicester Print workshop to undertake a residency to make a series of (Prints) working with the bequeathed plates.
The thematic for my work is exploring ideas of loss, memorialisation and honouring what has gone before while producing an extended and reiterated body of work.
I worked with these etching plates to explore a new series of works that extend images made in the 1950’s through to the 1970’s into contemporary etchings with new meanings and a different narrative. By this I mean making completely different images without desecrating the metal on which her images already exist.

Keywords

  • printmaking
  • printmaking in the expanded field
  • contemporary art

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