Impressions

Earlier this year, my girlfriend Shuqi and I made a podcast on Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter most famed for his allegorical paintings representing themes of love, loneliness, fear, and existential dread. As part of this research, I was drawn to Edvard Munch’s unique prints that experimentally combined etching, aquatint, drypoint etching, and woodcut to convey poignantly the themes he is most famous for. To me, these works seemed far more interesting than his paintings. I wondered why in the contemporary art world prints had often been relegated to the status of a poor man’s painting.

Some months after the podcast, Shuqi stumbled across Keziah Philipps, a graduate of the Royal Drawing School and an avid artist who makes unique prints striking for their inventive ardour, combining monoprint, layers of drypoint etching, mezzotint, and chine collé to create works that are rich in their atmospheric qualities and level of detail. We were immediately keen to show her work. Her series of bonfire images were particularly riveting in their complexity and cacophony of colours. Since the Renaissance, fire had been a popular theme in painting, with artists including Hieronymus Bosch, Jan Brueghel the Elder, and Joseph Mallord William Turner having taken up this subject matter. In its fleeting movement and glow, fire is hard to depict and therefore suited to demonstrate the richness in print.

All prints in the show depict the same fire, but each print is unique in its colours and virtuosity of details. Perhaps her monochrome work Untitled (2024) is the best work to consider first; applied in a single layer of drypoint etching it conveys the base layer image. All the other works in the show include additional layers and levels of detail and convey an aura that suggests different feelings and ways of looking at and capturing the same experience. Can we have a volunteer to tell that mad person over there that she has gone mad? (2024) and Maybe everyone feels like this? (2024) are perhaps the most layered works in the show in that they include impressions of the artist’s fingerprints through the chine collémethod, a method involving the addition of a differently textured paper during the printing process. The atmospheric variation in the prints is reflected in their titles, with each providing a jocular commentary and a different way of looking at the same image.

Nicholas Marschner is a self-taught painter. His paintings share a similar sensibility to Philipps’, with his compositions atmospherically rich and almost glowing, suggesting a world of contemplative stillness. For Marschner, painting is typically an arduous process. Making sketches in pencil and ink it takes a while for him to settle on the right motif. He is drawn to scenes that capture the fleetingness of life. His work is very much about existence but often only features humans as props or puppets as if they had been stripped from Oskar Schlemmer’s triadic ballet. Once the sketch has been settled Marschner paints in many layers – typically from light colours to darker ones. The background layers of light seep through the darkness, only leaving certain details and props illuminated. It is often unclear whether we are looking at a real subject, a dream, or the concoction of the imagination.

Marschner’s painting Untitled (2024) features two people perched on a balcony in an elevated structure. The left figure shows us their back and looking toward a sunrise or sunset, framed by the apparition of a lake and a receding hill-line. The figure to the right is facing us in profile, looking downward, as if there is a secret to be gleaned beyond the picture plane. Are these figures friends or lovers? We cannot tell. The masking of people is expressive in Marschner’s work; it captures the alienation and loneliness often felt as we glide through life.

‍

✍️ Martin S.