RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER

Richard Artschwager was born in 1923 in Washington, D.C., and spent much of his childhood in New Mexico. He served in World War II, and returned to finish his degree at Cornell University, where he received a BA in Chemistry in 1948. Artschwager lives and works in Hudson, New York.

In his approach to intaglio printmaking, Artschwager uses a variety of techniques-softground, hardground, drypoint, aquatint and roulette-to create the many textures and lines that define his images. In prints done at Harlan & Weaver, Artschwager revisits the six-object motif-table, window, mirror, door, rug, and basket-that has concerned his imagery for over three decades. These six objects have inspired over fifty drawings and at least two paintings. In this set of prints, all titled "t, w, m, d, r, b", 2003, Artschwager made extensive use of the aquatint process to create rich tonal gradations. These tones enhance the strong linear drawing of the rooms and their contents. The prints have a heightened sense of perspective, and a distinct concern with light, yet remain spatially enigmatic.

Artschwager has been widely recognized in exhibitions in the United States and Europe. His first solo exhibition was at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1965, where he continued to exhibit for several years. Since that time he has had numerous museum and gallery exhibitions, and has been in countless group shows. Artschwager has been included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Kulturforum, Berlin; Kunsthalle Basel; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; P.S. 1, Queens, New York; the Tate, London; the 39th Venice Biennial (1980); the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He also participated in Documenta 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9, in Kassel, Germany. He is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York.

WILLIAM BAILEY

William Bailey was born in Iowa in 1930. He received his BFA and MFA at Yale University, where he studied with Joseph Albers. He taught at Indiana University, and then at Yale, where he served as Dean of the Yale School of Art and was the Kingman Brewster Professor of Art. He lives and works in Connecticut, and maintains a studio in Italy.

Bailey's exceptional draftsmanship is well demonstrated in his prints. Employing classic motifs-the still life or artist's model-Bailey creates an atmosphere that is subtle and spatially enigmatic. Working from memory, without the aid of photography, he produces prints of great sensitivity and control. Gradually built up through several states of short etches, his line work achieves a luminous quality not unlike silverpoint drawing. Bailey's vigilance in execution echoes the conceptual quality of the images. His prints of the still life or figure seem suspended in memory, timeless and metaphysical.

Harlan & Weaver have worked with Bailey on several projects for outside publishers, notably Parasol Press, the Cleveland Print Club of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Graphics Arts Council of the Detroit Institute of the Arts. Harlan & Weaver have also published his prints. Most recently released was "Imaginary Studio", 2003, an intimate etching of a seated model resting between poses, slightly hunched in introspection.

William Bailey has been included in several important exhibitions, and has had numerous solo shows throughout the United States and Europe. A 30-year survey (from 1973 to 2003) of his prints and drawings, William Bailey: Prints and Drawings, showed at the Legion of Honor of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2003-2004. Among numerous awards and honors, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting in 1965, a Yale Arts Medal for Distinguished Contribution in Painting in 1985, was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in 1983-84, and has been, since 1986, an elected member of The American Academy of Arts and letters.

Bailey's works are in several public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the St. Louis Art Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas; and the Yale University Art Gallery. William Bailey is represented by Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and studied at the Sorbonne, the Ecole du Louvre and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Bourgeois moved to New York in 1938 with her husband, art historian and curator Robert Goldwater, and became an American citizen in 1955. Her sculptures, drawings and prints have been exhibited for six decades, with major installations at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1982), the Reina Sofia, Madrid (1999), the Tate Modern, London (2000), and the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (2001). She lives and works in New York.

Printmaking has been important to Bourgeois since the 1940s, when she worked at William Stanley Hayter's intaglio workshop, Atelier 17. Introduced to Felix Harlan and Carol Weaver in 1989 by master lithographer Judith Solodkin, Bourgeois now works almost exclusively on her intaglio prints with Harlan & Weaver. Harlan, who works closely with Bourgeois in her Chelsea home, proofs her plates on two hand-presses installed in her basement.

Masterful in her approach to the medium, Bourgeois's drypoints and engravings are generous in emotional impact. Engaging visceral and personal experience, her imagery often deals with private relationships (for example, between mother and child) and the separation and reconciliation inherent to them. She also interprets the external world-the natural and urban landscape-with wit and sensitive observation. In 2003, Harlan & Weaver published two Bourgeois portfolios, "La Reparation" and "The Laws of Nature", both of which deal with her common themes. They also oversaw the complex reworking of Bourgeois's 1947 book, He Disappeared into Complete Silence, a publication by the Museum of Modern Art.

Bourgeois has received many awards and commissions, among them the Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts in 1980, the National Medal of Arts in 1997, the Praemium Imperiale Award in 1999, the Wexner Prize in 1999, and, most recently, the Wolf Foundation Prize (2002-03). She represented the United States at the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1993, and was awarded the Golden Lion for a living master of contemporary art by the Venice Biennale in 1999.

Louise Bourgeois's work is in numerous international and national public collections, including the British Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Kunstmuseum Basel; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Reina Sophia, Madrid; the Tate, London; the Uffizi Museum, Florence; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Louise Bourgeois is represented by Cheim & Read Gallery, New York and Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne.

ROBERT COTTINGHAM

Robert Cottingham was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1935. He attended the Pratt Institute and received his BFA in 1963. Cottingham lives and works in Connecticut.

Cottingham's realist paintings and prints of American signage, architecture, and railroad imagery have been much esteemed, and much exhibited, over his four-decade career. Often based on extant paintings, his etchings are not only remarkable for their iconographic imagery, but for their technical mastery and often complex color separation. Harlan & Weaver's publication, "Women-Girls", 2002, is a large and striking print of neon light and its overlapping reflections on a yellow signboard. Work involved in the printing and intricate registration of five separate plates is well rewarded with an etching of saturated color and seamless execution.

The Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri, organized a retrospective of Cottingham's prints completed between 1972 and 1986, which traveled to a dozen venues across the country. There was a second major print retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1998-99, called Eyeing America, The Prints of Robert Cottingham.

He has also been in several group print exhibitions throughout his career, including shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1978), the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1981), Yale University Art Gallery (1986), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (1987) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1993). Also notable among his many museum exhibitions have been those focusing on particular series of works: An American Alphabet, for example, seen at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996 and 1997; Rolling Stock, organized by the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1992, and House Stills, at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1997-98. In 1987 a twelve-panel series of baked-enamel railroad images was permanently installed in Union Station in Hartford, Connecticut.

Cottingham's works are in several public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Institute of Art; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery. Robert Cottingham is a member of the National Academy of Design, New York. He has taught at the National Academy of Design and the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, and was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts in 1974-75. He is represented by Forum Gallery, New York.

STEVE DIBENEDETTO

Steve DiBenedetto was born in Bronx, New York in 1958. He received his BFA in 1980 from Parsons School of Design, and currently lives and works in New York City.

DiBenedetto is best known for thickly layered paintings and prismatic pencil drawings populated by organic and mechanic forms. Undulating octopi, arms twisted in Celtic-like knots, and hovering helicopters, blades madly turning, are common motifs. Ferris wheels, also on their circular path, make appearances, as do remnants of forgotten architecture and celestial beings. The serpentine structures of DiBenedetto's work seem to be in a constant state of apocalyptic decomposition, but are simultaneously alive and charged with palpable electricity.

In his first print, History of Separation, 2004, DiBenedetto masterfully employed line etching to produce a print that vibrates with Baroque decay, the active elements in the image's composition linked by the stretched and knotted tentacles of a palpitating octopus. The image is one of horror-vacui, its surface covered with vigorous lines stimulated by the implied energy emanating from the helicopter's blades and from the ruined structure of the octopus' habitat. The variation in line weight and the density of certain areas suggests layering of tone and color, as is so evident in DiBenedetto's colorful paintings and drawings. As David Kiehl, curator of prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, noted in this regard: "History of Separation is a black-and-white print, but I see it in color; the quality of line, and the spaces between the lines, are rendered in terms of color." The Whitney Museum acquired the print in February of 2005, shortly after its public release.

DiBenedetto has had several solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad, in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. He has also been included in important thematic exhibitions, including "Curious Crystals of Unusual Purity" at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, Queens (2004), "Drawing Out of the Void" at Vestry Arts, New York (2004), "Transcendent & Unrepentant" at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2002), "Best of Season" at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (2001), and "Post-Hypnotic" at the University Galleries at Illinois State University in Normal, IL (1999). He was recently included in a group exhibition at the Whitney Museum, NY (2005), "Remote Viewing," curated by Elisabeth Sussman.

DiBenedetto has received several awards throughout his career, including, in 2003, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Painting, and the Tiffany Foundation Award. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University and Cooper Union in New York and at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Jersey. DiBenedetto is represented by David Nolan Gallery in New York and Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles.

JOEY KÖTTING

Joey Kötting was born in England in 1966. He received his BFA in 1988 from Brighton Polytechnic, East Sussex, England; working towards his degree, he also studied at St. Martin’s School of Art in London and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1991, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Kötting is a painter whose activities include performance, photography and video. He uses his body, face and physical activities as a canvas. His work intentionally references the history of painting and figurative art; drips of blood-like paint mask his features and suggest the marks of gestural abstraction and action painting.

Code Error, 2007 and Either/Or, 2007 are the first prints that Kötting has made with Harlan & Weaver. Code Error, a set of two prints, was executed entirely in soft ground. Code Error was selected to be part of a juried show, “New Prints Autumn, 2007”, at International Print Center New York which later proceeded to Chicago’s Columbia College. The set was also included in Art on Paper magazine’s special November/December 2007 issue: “The 4th Annual New Prints Review.”

Kötting has had solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad. His most recent solo exhibitions include: “Atrocity Exhibition” at Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York (2004), “Help! (bannersflyerstencils)” at Larissa Goldston Gallery in New York (2006) and “The art of Pilgrim(agin)g at Gallerie Fortlaan 17 in Ghent, Belgium (2007). Also of late, his work has been included in “New Prints” at International Print Center New York, New York (2007), “Il Faut Rendre à Cézanne” at Collection Lambert, Avignon, France (2007) and “Longitude/Latitude” at Galerie Fortlaan 17, Ghent, Belgium (2007). Kötting has received several awards throughout his career, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship Award in 2004. He is represented by Larissa Goldston Gallery in New York and Galerie Fortlaan 17 in Ghent, Belgium.

THOMAS NOZKOWSKI

Thomas Nozkowski was born in New Jersey in 1944. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 1967, and currently lives and works in New York.

A critically acclaimed and influential abstract painter, Nozkowski makes small and medium sized paintings on panel or paper. Characterized by innovative color and composition, Nozkowski's work is based on close observation of his surroundings. Abstracted forms are derived from shapes and patterns found in nature and from man made objects in the urban environment. This inspiration provides unexpected arrangements of color and form which can be equally jarring or beautiful, and always strikingly original in feeling. Nozkowski has made few etchings in his career. When Harlan & Weaver published his first forays into the medium, he embraced the technique and created two complex color aquatints.

Taking the opportunity to experiment with the multiple plate process inherent to color etching, Nozkowski made two separate images while using the same background plate, wiped in different colors, for both prints. In this way, he exposes the printmaking process while producing prints that echo and complement each other. Both exhibit his mastery of form, and his idiosyncratic use of color.

Nozkowski's work can be found in several major public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the New York Public Library; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Nozkowski has received several awards throughout his career, including a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist's Grant in 1984, a New York State for the Arts Fellowship in 1989, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1993, two American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prizes, in 1998 and 1999, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Painting in 1999. Among several gallery and museum shows, he has had major solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in 1997, at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas, in 1998, and at the Ace Gallery in Los Angeles in 2001. In 2003, he had an exhibition of drawings at the New York Studio School. He is represented by Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York. Nozkowski is a professor of painting at the Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University.

MICHELLE SEGRE

Michelle Segre was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1965. She received her BFA in 1987 from Cooper Union School of Art, and currently lives and works in New York City.

Both sculptor and draftsperson, Segre is known for oversized, organic sculptures and crowded linear drawings. She approaches each medium with microscopic attention; her works are highly detailed and finely realized studies of entropic growth and disintegration. In her first print, Swamp Eyes, 2005, Segre used both line etch and spit bite aquatint to create a densely populated garden-like landscape of unfamiliar creatures. Webbed in by linear patterns emulating the organic structure of crystals, the details of the picture ebb and flow with the viewer's eye, coming into focus and then disappearing again. Camouflaged numbers (birthdates, addresses) and letters are momentarily evident, appearing as hidden clues. The longer one looks, the more one sees, yet an attempt to decipher the composition leads only to further questions regarding subject, scale and surface. Like Alice in the rabbit-hole, the viewer loses their sense of place as participant, and remains a furtive onlooker.

When making her drawings, Segre uses ink or gouache; both irreversible mediums. The permanence of the etched line provided Segre with a similar mark-making experience. After drawing on the plate, her lines were etched generously, mimicking the linear solidity of her drawings. The difficulty of rethinking (or erasing) a composition of etched lines reinforces the meditative, stream-of-conscious characteristic of her work. Segre's shadowy spitbite helps to locate figures and events within the detailed activity, and was applied with sensitivity to tone and tonal gradation.

In addition to solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles, Segre has been included in several group shows in the United States and abroad, among them the recent "Greater New York" at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, Queens (2005), "Curious Crystals of Unusual Purity" at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (2004), "Ballpoint Inklings" at K.S. Art, New York (2003), "By Hand: Pattern, Precision and Repetition in Contemporary Drawing" at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, CA (2001), "Almost Warm and Fuzzy: Childhood and Contemporary Art" at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and Fundacio la Caixa, Barcelona, Spain (2001), "Fresh: the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection" at the New Museum, New York (2001), and "Here: Artist's Interventions at the Aldrich Museum" at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (1998).

Segre received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award in 2001. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She currently teaches at New York University. Segre is represented by Derek Eller Gallery in New York.

JAMES SIENA

James Siena was born in California in 1957 and received his BFA in 1979 from Cornell University. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Siena creates paintings, drawings, and prints in which hand-rendered procedural abstractions, methodically executed, cover a wide range of modalities and produce multiple visual and psychological effects. Siena's work stimulates both the eye and the brain. As Roberta Smith wrote in an early review of his paintings: "Mr. Siena is unusually adept at translating the mental into the visual. His paintings think as good as they look." The jewel-like surfaces of his paintings become equally compelling when transformed into the medium of intaglio printmaking. Tactile, compressed and intricate, the work is above all emphatically physical, as seen in the raised surface of the etched line, and the attentive use of color. Harlan & Weaver have published several individual prints and two portfolios of nine prints with Siena. The close proximity of their studios has helped to foster an enduring working relationship.

Siena's recent solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles have been greeted with great critical acclaim. He was included in the highly regarded Greater New York show, 2000, at PS1-MoMA in Long Island City, Queens. A ten-year survey of his work, originating at The San Francisco Art Institute, traveled to The University of Akron, in Ohio in 2003. He has also been included in important thematic exhibitions at the University Art Museum in Long Beach, California (By Hand: Pattern, Precision and Repetition in Contemporary Drawing, curated by Mary-Kay Lombino) and Kent State University (Accumulations, curated by Martin Ball), both 2001; and the University Galleries at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois (Post-Hypnotic, with a catalogue by Barry Blinderman and Tom Moody), in 1999; as well as at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, N.C.. In 2000, he received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition. In 2004, he was selected for the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Siena's works are in many public institutions and collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1999 he was a recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award. He has taught at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Jersey, Virginia Commonwealth University, the San Francisco Art Institute and the School of Visual Arts, New York. James Siena is represented by PaceWildenstein in New York and Daniel Weinberg in Los Angeles.

KIKI SMITH

Kiki Smith was born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1954, and grew up in New Jersey. She lives and works in New York. Inspired by early studies in film and glass, and by work as a puppeteer, an industrial baker and an emergency medical technician, Smith began showing her art with the influential artist's collective, "Collaborative Projects" in the early 1980's.

First recognized for her innovative work concerning the human body, Smith is a prolific printmaker, and has experienced working at several different printshops throughout her career. She began work with Harlan & Weaver in 1997 with the five-plate, twenty-foot "Destruction of Birds", published by Thirteen Moons. Since then, Smith has worked on several more projects with Harlan & Weaver, including the first of a group of animal prints, "Immortal", 1998, and the fifteen-print set "Blue Plates", 1999.

Smith has embraced the delicacy and sensitivity achieved with a finely etched line, and has produced prints that are simultaneously fragile and self-assured. Prints published by Harlan & Weaver share a common thread: most are representations of hair, in either animal or human form. Layering line upon line with short etches, and employing sandpaper as a way to add to and remove aquatint tone, Smith works and reworks the etched plate, adding depth and realism to the final image. In the etchings of animals, as in "Fawn" 2001, or "Ginzer" 1999, the texture of the hair is rendered with careful observation. "Falcon", 2001, shows similar study of the graceful overlapping of a bird's feathers. In etchings like "Two", 2002, and "The Remains", 2003, the individual lines of the face and beard are personal descriptions of her subject.

Smith has shown extensively in the United States and abroad. She has been in several important solo and group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial in 1991 and 1993; Kiki Smith at the Louisiana Museum of Art in 1994; Paradise Cage: Kiki Smith and Coop Himmelblau at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1996; Kiki Smith: Convergence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Kiki Smith at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas in 1997; My Nature: Works with Paper by Kiki Smith at the St. Louis Art Museum in 1999; Regarding Beauty: A View of the late Twentieth Century at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and The American Century: Art & Culture 1950-2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in 1999-2000; Telling Tales at the International Center for Photography in 2001; the Whitney Biennial in 2002; a major print retrospective, Kiki Smith: Prints, Books & Things at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2003-2004 and currently traveling, Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980 – 2005.

Smith's work is included in a long list of public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the New York Public Library; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery. She has done several visiting artist workshops at universities and studios around the country, and has taught printmaking at New York University, Columbia University and Temple University. She is represented by PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York.

MARK STRAND

Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1934, Mark Strand was raised in the United States and South America. He received his B.F.A. in painting at Yale University. Strand became renowned for his poetry, while still painting throughout his career. He is the author of nine books of poetry including Blizzard of One, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999. He has written numerous other books, including monographs on William Bailey and Edward Hopper, and Art of the Real: Nine American Figurative Painters. Strand is also known for translations of the poetry of Rapheal Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Introduced to Harlan & Weaver by his old friend William Bailey, Strand made four prints with them in 1997-98. He worked from pen and ink drawings of the Blasket Islands off Ireland's southwestern coast, where he owned a house that looked seaward. Strand's etchings are redolent of the moody atmosphere of his subject. He did several experiments with the inking of his plates, exploiting the softness achieved by leaving excess ink on the surface of the plate during printing.

The final edition was printed using a tarlatan wipe in which black ink was left selectively in the sky and water. This printing method captured a sense of the constantly changing effects of light and weather on the Irish landscape. While his drawings of the landscape were cold and stark, Strand's etchings, because of the discerning wipe of the plate, became infused with the temperamental quality of the natural environment.

Mark Strand has been awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (1987), and has served as Poet Laureate of the United States (1990). He currently teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and lives and works in New York.