© copyright The Artist
UNTITLED 1988
Alan Davie (1920 – 2014)
Details
- Dimension
- 42.5 X 34.5 CM
- Media
- LITHOGRAPH
- Accession number
- P6023
Summary
These are the first prints Davie had made since the early 1970s. The artist made hundreds of brush drawings and from these selected 18 to be used as prototypes for the portfolio. The drawings served only as a guide for the work drawn by Davie onto transfer papers, these were in turn transposed onto zinc lithographic plates. The imagery in the portfolio was inspired by ancient symbols such as spirals, ankhs and crosses and drawn from many cultural sources – Aboriginal, Carib and American Indian amongst others, with phrases in Spanish and French placed alongside the images. Together the words and images work in a suggestive way, inviting connections to be made without giving specific meanings and seeming like a book of spells or incantations.
Magic Readerwas published in 1988 by Charles Booth-Clibborn under his imprint The Paragon Press and printed by Ian Lawson, Arthur Watson and Simon King in an edition of 50.
Further reading:
Contemporary Art in Print, Scottish National Gallery of Modern and The Paragon Press, 1995, texts by Jeremy Lewison, Duncan Macmillan and Patrick Elliott
Glossary
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Edition
All copies of a book, print, portfolio, sculpture, etc., issued or produced at one time or from a single set of type. Printed works can be made in an edition of between one and many thousands of copies. With most printing techniques the plate or screen will become worn if very many prints are made, so to maintain quality (and exclusivity) editions of original prints are usually kept below one hundred copies and normally average between thirty and fifty copies. Prints made up of several different plates can be extremely complicated and time-consuming to edition, so in these cases editions are kept low for practical reasons. Sculptural editions are a set of cast sculptures taken from the same mould or master. These editions are usually much lower, consisting of no more than six casts. Though each cast in an edition might have a lower value than a unique piece, it may be a more effective way of offsetting costs of an expensive process such as bronze casting.
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Imprint
In a bibliographic item, the name of the publisher, distributor, or manufacturer, and the place and date of publication.
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Portfolio
A set of pictures (as drawings, photographs or prints) either bound in book form or loose in a folder. These can be by the same artist or individual works by a selection of artists. The term also refers to the folder which holds the set.
