Limited Edition Print – Alan Reid, Untitled, 2015
Alan Reid is an American artist who lives in New York City. Known for his gauzy, colored-pencil representational images of heiresses, bored fashionistas and aquiline beauties that have been called provocatively light, with coloring as delicate as his women are elegant.
This limited edition print takes into context the historical relevance of II Bisonte, the print studio where it was made - and reflects the printers’ illustrious engagement with modern European masters: Moore, Matisse, Picasso. As a result Alain Reid, an artist who is both outside the Modernist tradition and non-European asked himself a question, “what aesthetic language would be available to an American arriving at the print studio in the first half of our century?” and created a print playing within this game.
Putting himself back in time, he took inspiration from mass-produced pochoir covers of Vogue and a hard-to-place artist Ben Shawn. As a result the print includes a zebra, reminiscent of A.E. Marty’s famous Vogue cover. The zebra is rearing up in front of a fire, the flames drawn from a Shawn image. He says ‘somehow to my mind these are emblematic of a moment just before the authority of Modernism began to collapse.’
Selected exhibition history: Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad; Lisa Cooley, New York, where he also co-organized the exhibition ‘Air de Pied-à-terre A Pallazzo, Brescia; Mary Mary, Glasgow; Galerie Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt; Talbot Rice, Edinburgh; Reid is included in the second edition of Phaidon’s “Vitamin D.”
Villa Lena Foundation Print Editions- The Traditional Art of Printmaking with contemporary artists
Each year the Villa Lena Foundation works in collaboration with II Bisonte and a selection of contemporary artists on the Villa Lena residency programme in order to develop and produce a series of limited edition prints. Artists work with expert technicians to explore new techniques and push their practice into exciting and uncharted territory. A number of these unique prints are now available to purchase online.
Il Bisonte is a print-workshop for graphic arts founded in Florence in 1959 by Maria Luigia Guaita. Many artists – both Italian and non – accepted the invitation to work at Il Bisonte. including members of the Futurist movement -Gino Severini, Carlo Carrà, Alberto Magnelli, and such international stars as Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Helen Chadwick, Alexander Calder and Henry Moore. In 1983 Il Bisonte became a non-profit Cultural Centre and opened an international school, with the focus to preserve the teaching and printing of the traditional engraving techniques.
ALL PROCEEDS FROM PRINT SALES WILL GO TOWARDS SUPPORTING THE VILLA LENA FOUNDATION.