Five women printmakers to know in 2024

Julie Mehretu (b. 1970)

With a title referring to a place where order descends into chaos, Julie Mehretu’s 2004 print Entropia (review) combines both screenprint and lithograph.

It’s composed of 32 layers, produced from a mix of digital images and drawings by Mehretu, which have been pulled by hand from light-sensitive screens and plates.

‘The first 19 screenprinted layers produce the large swathes of solid colour, along with a few layers of clear gloss and pearlescent powder to give the image a sheen,’ explains Baskerville. ‘There are then four layers made with lithography, creating the grey and black linear details. These were followed by seven more coloured screenprint layers.’

The highly complex project took Mehretu and a team of 12 assistants two years to complete. The work was produced in an edition of 45, along with six artist’s proofs.

Although best known for her large abstract paintings — quasi-maps of urban, social and political change — the Ethiopian-American artist has been experimenting with prints since the 1990s, when she enrolled on an MFA in painting and printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design.

Over the years, Mehretu has worked with some of the most celebrated studios in America, including Crown Point Press in San Francisco, Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles and Derrière L’Etoile Studios and Burnet Editions in New York. Entropia (review) was co-published by Highpoint Editions and the Walker Art Center, both in Minneapolis.

Caroline Walker (b. 1982)

In 2018, the Scottish artist Caroline Walker partnered with the independent British publisher Enitharmon Editions to create her second suite of lithographs, titled Sunset Portfolio.

Expanding on a series of paintings exhibited in Los Angeles earlier that year, the four works depict scenes from the daily life of a female character living in the Hollywood Hills. The model was a Miss Colorado of the late 1970s. ‘There’s a strong sense of voyeurism,’ Walker said of the series. ‘Of watching and being watched. In Bathed she looks back inside the house, perhaps to where we are situated, as though acknowledging the viewer’s gaze, or perhaps another figure.’

‘Every colour in Bathed is pulled from a different lithographic stone,’ explains Christie’s Prints and Multiples senior specialist James Baskerville. ‘It’s a complicated process of precisely building up layers.

‘Unlike woodcuts or screenprints, lithography enables you to get this wonderful painterly quality, as the artist draws or brushes onto each stone. The result is that Bathed looks almost like watercolour.’

Sarah Sze (b. 1969)

In 2011, two years before Sarah Sze’s Venice Biennale presentation Triple Point — a huge installation that investigated the three states in which water can exist — she created this set of six screenprints.

Embodying Sze’s interest in categorisation, colour and complex systems, the work, called 2, expands on the Ishihara colour-blindness test, which was first published by the University of Tokyo ophthalmologist Shinobu Ishihara in 1917. By removing crucial colours or forms from each sheet, the artist has transformed the sight examination into an exercise in memory.

Sze started teaching at Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York in 2002. The following year she began collaborating with the university’s LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies.

‘Her earliest prints were large-scale offset lithographs printed on Japanese Okawara paper, which is made from hemp and mulberry tree fibres,’ explains Baskerville. ‘These were followed by works incorporating intricately cut, laser-engraved paper, which explored Sze’s fascination with new technologies and mapping space.’

This work, printed on Coventry Rag — a paper specially designed to withstand multiple layers of screenprint — was the last Sze made at the LeRoy Neiman Center. Created in an edition of 29, it was exhibited in her solo show Sarah Sze: Infinite Line at New York’s Asia Society in 2012, then in Art on Paper: 10 Women Artists at the Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon University, in 2016-17.

Loie Hollowell (b. 1983)

Operating somewhere between abstraction and figuration, the American artist Loie Hollowell makes paintings, drawings and prints that evoke the landscape of the female body. Like sacred geometries, her shapes and colours reference spirituality, sex, pregnancy and birth.

Standing in Light and Standing in Shadow are a pair of woodcuts produced by Hollowell and the printing arm of Pace Gallery in New York. They were each released in an edition of 25 at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018.

The woodcuts were made in the Japanese style of ukiyo-e printing by master carver Yasu Shibata, who trained in the traditional technique at Kyoto Seika University. They’re printed on Simili Japon paper, which is a thick, smooth, off-white paper that was developed as an imitation of Japanese paper in Holland in the 18th century.

Hollowell’s Red Earth (2021), meanwhile, is a screenprint published by Migrate Art, an English charity that works with artists including Wolfgang Tillmans, Richard Long, Rachel Whiteread and Anish Kapoor to make prints that raise funds for humanitarian efforts around the globe.

The lower portion of Red Earth has been finished with a layer of crushed glass, which adds a tactile quality to the picture. ‘This material is similar to what Warhol referred to as “diamond dust”,’ explains Baskerville. ‘It provides the print with the sense of a shimmering, stony horizon.’

Jennifer Guidi (b. 1972)

Consisting of kaleidoscopic images that draw on Impressionism, West Coast Abstraction, Tibetan mandalas and the landscape of her native California, Jennifer Guidi’s work has been interpreted as depicting various states of meditation.

Guidi created Rainbow Orb 2 in 2023. ‘This vivid digital print on 100-per-cent cotton paper has been enhanced with layers of varnish and glass flocking,’ explains Baskerville. ‘The technique produces a crystalline texture recalling the artist’s sand-encrusted canvases.’

In fact, the print is based on a 2017 painting of the same name. Created in an edition of 35, Rainbow Orb 2 was co-published in New York by Artspace, an online art sales platform, and the fine arts publisher Phaidon.

‘I’m exploring colour. I’m exploring texture and form, and this idea of energy, creating a vibration that, when you are in front of the work, is something you can feel,’ the artist told Artspace ahead of the print’s launch.

Christie’s Prints and Multiples season takes place in London and New York from 12 to 27 March 2024, with Contemporary Edition: London and Prints and Multiples open for bidding online from 12 and 13 March respectively. Contemporary Edition: New York takes place on 14 March