School Prints revives a groundbreaking scheme set up in the UK in the 1940s to supply original, high-quality contemporary art to primary schools. Six British artists – Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Anthea Hamilton, Helen Marten, Haroon Mirza and Rose Wylie – have been invited to create limited edition prints that will be given to the Wakefield primary schools taking part in the scheme.
To coincide with the exhibition, The Hepworth Wakefield are delighted to offer for sale a series of the limited edition prints, kindly donated by the artists. All profits raised by the sales of the prints will fund a full engagement programme with the participating schools.
Martin Creed - Work No. 2874 - 2017
'I like broccoli. It's my favourite vegetable. I eat broccoli every day. I like prints made from broccoli because they look like pictures of trees, and I like trees. But I don't know what colours I like, so I thought I could try a mixture of different colours.' - Martin Creed
Medium: Lithograph
Size: 76 x 49.5 cm
Edition of 85 + AP's
Signed and numbered
Price: £500
Jeremy Deller - The Problem with Humans - 2017
'I’ve always felt that contemporary art is much better suited to children than it is to adults. Because adults bring so many preconceived ideas and fears about art, whereas children react in a much more visceral, immediate way. The best artists should have their work seen in schools. It totally makes sense.
My print is almost like an illustration from a book. It’s meant to make little kids smile’ - Jeremy Deller
Medium: Lithograph
Size: 76 x 49.5 cm
Edition of 85 + AP's
Signed and numbered
Price: £500
Anthea Hamilton - Daydreamer's Wavy Boot - 2017
'Perhaps this is a self-portrait of me as a young girl? The shiny leg of the boot, neat and wavy like the long black plaits I wore every day. The grown-up high heel made of bricks is the Victorian school building we surreptitiously carved our names into the walls of with little stones from the playground floor. And the clouds rolling in blue sky are what I would watch out of the tall windows as I listened a little, daydreamed a little, during school assemblies, maths lessons, stories of how volcanoes are formed and practised joined-up handwriting. As a kid I didn’t know such a thing as being an artist was possible, perhaps as unlikely as making a portrait of oneself as a boot? It fits me perfectly.' - Anthea Hamilton
Medium: Lithograph
Size: 76 x 49.5 cm
Edition of 85 + AP's
Signed and numbered
Price: £500
Helen Marten - Untitled (School Prints) - 2017
'The body and its movement through the various volumes of daily space has long been a starting point for artists through history. In this lithograph, the primary lines construct a huddled group of figures, morphing through one another in a manner that could describe an embrace, but also the metaphoric dissolution of one form into many. This body could be one gender or multiples of a state more flexible and deconstructed than any binary classification.
The amorphous blobs and shapes that surround the central protagonists are both landscapes (approximate trees or plant life) and shifting forms whose semi-legibility joins the figures in a refusal to conform to definite meaning. The surrounding shapes disguise yet more faces, sentences and alphabet forms which provide the landscape with a more surreal grammar – this is a landscape in which fabrications are possible and encouraged. There are painterly marks, splashes and drips which combine in a celebration of texture and the authorial gestures of mark-making.
With its softly pastel palette, the lithograph relies on colours not quite reminiscent of our daily lives. They are neither psychedelic nor magical but plausibly just one junction removed from reality. Perhaps this is the space of memory, of dreams, or surrealist apparition. Who are these figures? What are their relationships to us the viewer and where are we all going?' - Helen Marten
Medium: Lithograph
Size: 76 x 49.5 cm
Edition of 85 + AP's
Signed and numbered
Price: £500
Haroon Mirza - Photons and Friends - 2017
Everyone is born an artist. That is to say that we all draw from an early age. The act of drawing is both an attempt to understand the world we inhabit and a way of imagining what the world might be. Like artists, theoretical physicists continue this process throughout their adulthood. My print is a homage to that idea and particularly to the work of Garrett Lisi, who created the complex and elegant piece of geometry that aims to map all the known fundamental particles along with possible undiscovered ones. A variation of this pattern is depicted alongside a trompe l’œil image of a photovoltaic panel – a modern device capable of converting photons to energy.' - Haroon Mirza
Medium: Lithograph
Size: 76 x 49.5 cm
Edition of 85 + AP's
Signed and numbered
Price: £500
Rose Wylie - King John, Frog - 2017
'I like frogs, there don’t seem to be a lot about any more. This image was triggered by a television programme on King John, who was not popularly considered a ‘good’ king at the time. The story has it that some monks decided to get rid of him by extracting poison from a frog, disguising it in wine and offering it to a travel-worn king. So this frog is both historically fixed and an example of a contemporary frog drawing, similar to that shown on the programme to catch and embody the historical fact. A suitable subject for schools... green colour for frogs, lateral politics and endangered species; with an apparently random 'King John' written into the print, but in fact there to establish connection and scholarship, and to encourage discussion.' - Rose Wylie
Medium: Lithograph
Size: 76 x 49.5 cm
Edition of 85 + AP's
Signed and numbered
Price: £500
All these great limited edition prints are available individually or you can order the complete portfolio. Both available at The Hepworth Wakefield
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[…] School Prints revives a groundbreaking scheme set up in the 1940s to supply original, high-quality contemporary art to primary schools. Last year, six British artists – Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Anthea Hamilton, Helen Marten, Haroon Mirza and Rose Wylie – were invited to create limited edition prints that were gifted to participating Wakefield schools. (Covered) […]