It gives me great pleasure to support the new Prints Survey Show at Pallant House Gallery, the first major museum exhibition on this period in British prints.
Curated by Simon Martin and Louise Weller, it features over 100 prints by 90 different artists, from 1960-2020.
The majority of works featured in the exhibition are drawn from the Golder – Thompson Gift, the result of a unique twenty-year partnership between Pallant House Gallery and collectors Mark Golder and Brian Thompson, who have donated over 500 works to Pallant House Gallery for the enjoyment by the broadest possible audience.
The Triumph of Wealth and the Triumph of Poverty- which can also be found in the collection of the British Museum- are included in the show.
Alexander Massouras on his diptych: "Initially inspired by Hans Holbein’s long lost Triumphs of Riches and Poverty, these triumphs are an old pairing. Their contrast has long been complicated by the appearance of both virtues and vices in each triumph. In their Renaissance iterations, they are fairly moral and didactic, but the way they were annotated and labelled reminded me of later, more satirical, prints. The major alteration in my triumphs is spatial: Wealth becomes circular, so riches beget riches, and Poverty is halted by an enclosed space. I also added dozing intercessors between the main body of the etchings and the script below to suggest an internal or conceptual aspect to wealth and poverty."
Other artists in the show include Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Eduardo Paolozzi and Bridget Riley amongst many others.
