21 Sep – 17 Nov 13 FAC Print Award
– Fremantle Art Centre AUS
The annual Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award supported by Little Creatures Brewing is Australia’s premier printmaking award and presents a showcase of Australia’s finest prints and artists’ books. Returning for its 38th year, this award and exhibition reflects the state of printmaking in contemporary Australian art practice. Emerging and established artists submit some 300 entries a year with around 50 of the best entries exhibited.
Maciver’s entry for the 2013 Fremantle Print Award is a diptych titled, ‘Faces, Faces Everywhere’. Maciver has worked on both paintings at the same time and used one wet painting to imprint another before working further into each individual work.
‘Faces, Faces Everywhere’ is a naive comment on a process developed from Sam Glankoff (1894-1982), who was a New York based, American artist. Glankoff developed an original technique that combined aspects of print-making and painting in an all-new, modernist genre titled “ print-paintings”.
In, ‘Faces, Faces Everywhere’ the outcome is a series of layered paints that are a clear reflection of this process undertaken. There is not enough diagnostic information in the individual features to clearly determine this work as portraiture, yet something about the overall organization of the image, the gestalt, is still allowing us to recognize a face.
Because of the nature of this particular approach, it is difficult to place this artwork within the traditional categories of painting or printmaking. It is not difficult however, to contend that it is neither painting nor printing in the purest sense.