On the corner of Melrose Avenue and Kings Road in West Hollywood sits an unassuming building designed by Frank Gehry in the 1970s. It incorporates elements of the “Los Angeles School” of deconstruction such as exposed wood frames, skylights, and airy spaces ideal for art making, an activity that has long occupied Gemini GEL, one of North America’s preeminent printmaking studios since 1966. Its client list is American artists from the mid-century onward, and this year marks its 60th anniversary.
“These are multiple generations of artists,” curator Susan Duckerman tells the Observer of the Los Angeles-themed exhibition.Los Angeles Impressions: 60 Years of Printing in Gemini GEL“, through May 1. “This presentation can be presented over and over again using different images. Looking through the prints, I realized that there was a wonderful array of images in which artists tried to recreate the weather conditions of Los Angeles, the sunlight, the fog, the mist, the abundance of Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles magic hours, from Ken Price’s strobe light to the ubiquitous magic hour captured by Tacita Dean.
In addition to the above, there are works by people such as David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Serra, Bryce Marden, Anne Hamilton, John Baldessari, Richard Tuttle, Analia Saban, Frank Gehry, Ed Ruscha, Claes Oldenburg, William Crutchfield, Joe Goode, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Diebenkorn, Toba Khaduri, and Vija Celmins.
“One of the things Gemini did well was match artists with a technique that allowed them to execute their ideas no matter how difficult they were,” says Duckerman, a lecturer in art history at UCLA who specializes in Western print culture. “Some artists work closely with a master printer, and there are printers here who can solve their problems. When the artist says I want 75 shades, the printer figures it out. The artist has the vision, the printer has the technical skill.”
Lithography has changed little since 1796 when German playwright Alois Senefelder stumbled upon the idea of copying his texts by writing them in greasy crayon on limestone slabs and then printing them with rolled ink. While limestone is still sometimes used, its modern equivalent is the more manageable aluminum slab, where each color and shade requires a separate color. The first step is marking, applying the composition to the aluminum, followed by printing, and attaching the image to the surface. Each time the plate is printed, it must be re-inked.
For example, Liechtenstein is multi-colored Sun rays through the clouds (1985) required 27 colors in 23 sets of five aluminum panels, three Finnish birch plywood pieces, and 15 screens. “When people look at paintings, which are also complex to make, I don’t think they engage in the technical aspects. What kind of paint? Is it canvas? Is it linen?” Distinguishing between the two mediums and how they are perceived, says Dackerman. “I think prints lend themselves to complex analysis. Sometimes what gets lost is what happens when all that artistic skill ends up on a piece of paper and you have a great image.”
Tacita Dean Los Angeles Galore 2 (2016), a deceptively simple skyscape of blue-striped clouds, requires paintings of every shade of blue and white. “It looks like a picture but it’s not,” says Duckerman. “I drew it and used chalk and spray chalk and drew and smudged and I think it does a really good job of replicating the L.A. sky. Then, after painting the blue sky, I realized that the sky makes other colors in the hour right before sunset,” she describes Dean’s second piece in the show, Los Angeles Magic Hour 13 (2021).
A long-time resident of Los Angeles and now living in London, David Hockney creates prints incorporating a wide range of media and techniques ranging from the use of Mylar to iPad graphics. Includes his weather series from 1973 sun (1973), 8-colour lithograph/silkscreen, Shabourafive-colour lithograph, and rainSix-color lithography/silkscreen printing.
“I think this is one of the best print series he’s done,” Duckerman says, nodding approvingly. rain. “Once you set the color, you can make scratches in it, and this allowed it to get raindrops with a little bit of bounce at the bottom. It allowed the ink to drip and the edges became like puddles of water. You get a sharper line.”
Richard Diebenkorn twelve (1985) is done in his familiar style of blocks of beige, brown and green, bordered with blue, like empty plots of land from a bird’s eye view. The 14-color lithography appears to use the spotty texture of watercolor. “He allows the properties of the print to set the scene as if he were using paints to set the scene on those plates, making marks diluted with water which is very typical of lithography,” Duckerman points out. “In this print, that’s what he emphasizes. He allows that to happen when he puts the ink on the surface of the stone. And the way it moves, he leaves it there.”
Claes Oldenburg is primarily known for his folk art sculptures, and has four pieces in the exhibition, including Lace In Landscape Sneakers – Red (1991) and is based on one of his sculptures. The ankle-high sneakers blend into the white background leaving only the lace visible, which resembles a red palm tree, and the bow resembles a frond. He arrived in the city in 1968 and spent two months writing and drawing before creating the series of 12 images based on his observations and displaying them in his characteristic playful style.
Analia Saban Wooden floor on wood (horizontal) (2017) is a seemingly simple artistic exercise depicting the patterned floor of her West Adams home, a unique example of the challenges presented by the medium. It was made from an image that she transferred to an engraving plate, and reworked by the artist to emphasize the lines and cracks. “There’s an emulsion on the plate, a partial light emulsion, and light on the plate,” Duckerman explains, “but then the plate has to be slit so that the ink can settle into those slits and the plate can be compressed, creating an impression in the wood.”
Of the eight prints by Robert Rauschenberg, two are snowflakes produced in 1982, combining elements of the image and commenting on “unstable” Angelenos. Others, such as Kronosaurus (1993) features familiar landmarks such as a dinosaur with a clock in its mouth topping Ripley’s Boulevard in Hollywood’s Believe It or Not! museum. His L.A. Uncovered series from 1998 is a collage of familiar scenes drawn from images of storefronts, the Watts Tower and the Marlboro Man flying over the Sunset Strip, reading: “It’s real earthquakes, fires and riots.”
“It turns out to be true,” Duckerman joked. “They were all put together and printed. It gave a real flavor of what Los Angeles is.” The images consist of Sid Vicious, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Bob Marley Marmont Flair (1991), with a red curtain symbolizing the legendary West Hollywood hotel.
Beginning with Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz’s virus exhibition in 1957, Los Angeles evolved into a mecca for contemporary art, becoming the first to exhibit Andy Warhol’s soup cans and celebrating Marcel Duchamp with the first retrospective of his career in 1963. Movements such as Finish Fetish and Light and Space emerged in the 1960s, led by artists such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, pioneers of pop music. Artists like Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston have called the city home for decades.
With the opening of MOCA in 1986, the addition of The Getty in 1997, The Broad in 2015 and the expansion of LACMA (which opens next month), the city has become home to giants old and new, with Gemini GEL attracting practitioners from every corner of the country. “Los Angeles can be photographed in many different ways, and you can capture many different aspects of it,” Duckerman assures us. “It emerges as a subject in the artwork in a way that is so real that we don’t often think of the city as a subject. But Los Angeles is.”
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