Mark Francis – New Etchings

Donald Taglialatella is pleased to announce the fourth collaboration between World House Editions and London-based, Irish painter and printmaker, Mark Francis (b.1962).

For this project, the artist spent time on and off between July and early October of 2011 at Peter Kosowicz’s print studio, Thumbprint Editions, in London.  Combining etching with the aquatint, photo-etching, spit-bite, hard-ground and polymer gravure techniques, the artists’ new prints, each executed in editions of 50, are his most technically complex as well as being his largest at 41 1/4 x 33 inches (105 x 84 cm) sheet size.

What is immediate in the new prints is a network of grids, lattices and pathways that, although subtlety present in the artists’ earlier work, are now more formal and prominent.   Mark Francis’ new prints convey a strong sense of geometry, structure and in a sense, a degree of mapping with their dominant horizontal (longitudinal) and vertical (latitudinal) lines.  Drawing from the new stylistic direction in his paintings and drawings, the new prints by Mark Francis have been inspired by the artists’ residency at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, where he spent “quite a lot of time” in the library looking at diagrams of planetary systems.  Whereas the earlier work had its formal tension broken by cells, microbes and synapses, the newer work has more of a dialogue with minimal painting  – from the micro to the macro. The formal mapping structure of the work is now dotted with what could interpreted to be stars, somewhat akin to a constellation, which break the formal tension of the geometry.  Upon even closer inspection, a painterly field exists below the surface of the grid, a cosmos perhaps, creating a push-pull affect and trapping the viewer’s gaze.

Both new prints, Atlas #1 and Atlas #2, will be featured at World House Editions’ stand at the 2011 Editions|Artists’ Books Fair from 03 – 06 November 2011 in New York.  Mark Francis has exhibited consistently with World House Editions since his 2005 debut at the Baltimore Print Fair and since 2006 at the E|AB Fair.