An exhibition of over 70 prints dating from 1946 to 1976 selected by Richard Riley. It followed on chronologically from a previous British Council exhibition Out of the Wood and charted the development of British printmaking from the period 1946-1960, to years of post-war austerity and the 1960s onwards when professional edition printing studios gave rise to a boom in the serious print publishing industry. A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition (ISBN 0 86355 247 1) with an introduction by Bryan Robertson, detailed notes on the 34 artists, together with bibliographies and a glossary of print-making terms. The exhibition originated in 1994 and toured until 2001.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • 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.