Portrait: Prints from the Archive

Portrait is a selection of prints from Edinburgh Printmakers' Archive featuring portraiture and figurative art by June Carey, Moyna Flannigan, William Gillon, John Goto, Alasdair Gray, Peter Howson, Rachel MacLean, Jennifer McRae, Ellen Munro, Zuzana Ullmannová, Kirsty Whiten, and Adrian Wiszniewski.

This selection focuses on a range of figurative works and portraits from Edinburgh Printmakers’ Archive, demonstrating a mixture of different printmaking techniques and featuring artists that have worked closely with Edinburgh Printmakers from the 1980s to the present day. With the advance of technology, we can access and create our own portraits in seconds, and just as quickly dispose of them. Portrait draws attention to the permanence of portraiture and figuration in contemporary art, and aims to mark the unity between biography, history, and social matters.

Historically, the functions of portraiture were to emphasise the wealth, status, and beauty of the upper classes or remember the dead. In contemporary art today, it does more than explore psychoanalytic and semiotic theories through likeness, and now challenges the effects of gender and racial inequalities and other cultural and social issues.

There can be a point where portraiture crosses into figurative art. In contemporary art practices, ‘figurative’ works can also be achieved in any medium that references real life imagery, mostly to the human body. The aim is not always to capture the likeness, but rather to further along a narrative while still being representative.

Edinburgh Printmakers’ Archive records one edition of each print that has been made at EP by our studio technicians in collaboration with the many artists invited for exhibitions or residencies since the 1960s. This collection comprises over 1000 original prints representing a breadth of printmaking techniques and charts the changing landscape of the visual arts in Scotland.

Featuring: June Carey, Moyna Flannigan, William Gillon, John Goto, Alasdair Gray, Peter Howson, Rachel MacLean, Jennifer McRae, Ellen Munro, Zuzana Ullmannová , Kirsty Whiten, and Adrian Wiszniewski.

Born 1958, Peter Howson OBE is a Scottish painter and printmaker. He trained at the Glasgow School of Art and continued to become the leading figure of the Scottish figurative painting movement of the 1980s. His work is characterized by its grotesquely caricaturized figures. Howson was born in London of Scottish parents and moved with his family to Prestwick, Ayrshire, when he was four. He was a British official war artist in 1993 during the Bosnian War, traveling and documenting the horrors of armed conflict, with his paintings regularly appearing in the London Times. Howson is the recipient of numerous honours and awards for his contributions to the visual arts, notably including his appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 and the widespread reproduction of his images on a 1998 British postage stamp. 

Right: Peter Howson, Saracen Heads - Ned, etching, 1987