Grob Gallery is pleased to announce Gauguin Woodcuts, an exhibition dedicated to one of the most significant and underexamined bodies of work in modern art — the woodcut prints of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903).
While Gauguin's Tahitian paintings have long commanded institutional and market attention, his prints occupy a different register: more intimate, more physically insistent, and, in many respects, more radical. The woodcut provided Gauguin with an opportunity to coalesce broad, decorative forms with subtle, colouristic optical description — and to create a dark image that evoked the mysterious world he associated with Tahiti, and by extension, his own subconscious. Gauguin's creativity in the manipulation of his printmaking materials was extensive: he formulated oleoresinous media to produce textural effects and made selective use of hand- and stencil-applied colours across different impressions. Each print, even within a single suite, is effectively unique — the product of an artist who treated the block not as a matrix for reproduction but as a sculptural object in its own right.The exhibition brings together key works from the Noa Noa Suite and related periods, allowing visitors to trace the development of Gauguin's printmaking from its earliest experiments through to the monumental woodcuts of his final Polynesian years. Gauguin's creative process often involved repeating and recombining key motifs from one image to another, allowing them to evolve and metamorphose across mediums — and printmaking was a natural extension of this mercurial philosophy.If Picasso later played down his debt to Gauguin, there is no doubt that between 1905 and 1907 he felt a close kinship with this other Paul — and scholars have noted how the woodcuts specifically reinforced Picasso's interest in printmaking and conditioned the direction his art would take. The influence of these works on the subsequent history of modern art — on Expressionism, on primitivism, on the elevation of the print as an autonomous medium — cannot be overstated.
Gauguin Woodcuts is presented by Grob Gallery as part of its ongoing commitment to exhibitions that re-examine canonical works through close formal attention.
