Hoch-Tief-Flach-Durch-Druck | Gruppenausstellung | Raab Galerie | 13.03.-18.04.2026

We have been familiar with printmaking since Albrecht Dürer or from etchings from Andrea Mantegna’s time, which were of a high technical and intellectual standard. Today, works are often developed by the artist in collaboration with the print workshop. This leads to new approaches, ideas, techniques and processes. David Hockney, for example, has created highly complex works with the help of his sister and the latest technically sophisticated printers. Molly Godfarb also uses this technique, designing her prints in multiple layers on her iPad.

In recent decades, new printing techniques have emerged whose brilliance and vibrancy enchant the viewer. Experimentation is taking place in spraying, and stencils are particularly attractive because an artist can work with different colours on the same motif, using the spray very subtly to create the illusion of a single work. El Bocho has enchanted us all beyond Berlin with these works. New Yorker Bill Hickey uses printmaking to make ironic observations about advertising. His work draws our attention to ubiquitous phenomena in a humorous way.

Printmaking is a way for artists to experiment quickly with colour combinations. Sales develop over the years; friends and collectors can purchase prints early on, before deciding to buy more expensive works. Later on, prints offer an opportunity to acquire the early work of an artist whose earlier pieces are no longer available for purchase. In the 1960s, an American art student bought a print by Jasper Johns at the Morris Gallery in Detroit. Years later, as director of the Museum of Modern Art, he organised a solo exhibition of Jasper Johns’ work. Alex Katz is a contemporary of Jasper Johns and, like him, one of the great American Pop Art stars. His works are admired alongside those of Nicole Wittenberg and Ross Bleckner, who confirm the powerful message of Pop Art in the next generation.

K.H. Hödicke also comments on this in many of his large-format prints, having been inspired by the spirit of Pop Art during his DAAD scholarship in New York in 1968 and having pursued and developed its inspiration and ideas throughout his life.

Harry Kögler’s early works from the 1950s alongside Paul Uwe Dreyer’s from the 1970s and contemporary works by Raws and Skenar 73 are an exciting and profound sight, confirming the works of the older generation by the younger generations. All works are abstract.

Over the years, you have seen many classic works by Rainer Fetting and Markus Lüpertz in classic techniques in the gallery, and they cannot be missing from the exhibition. Two generations of artists from America and Berlin, representing the development of technique over more than thirty years, make for an interesting comparison. Finally, two years ago we began presenting prints by artists from the University of the Arts, whose new works you can now also see, along with Rachel Haaze, Ronja Look and Lillith Nossol, the third generation to impressively represent printmaking at our gallery.

As always, we pay special attention to the mavericks, because the unexpected often happens with them. These include Giacomo Piussi with monoprints, which play a rare role in his work and will delight collectors.

Giacomo Piussi, Sunglasses, 2024

Eliot surprises himself and us again and again with motifs from everyday life, which he deservedly places at the very centre of attention. The stern art critic Hubertus Giebe, who illustrated Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum as a young artist in Dresden in the 1980s, looks at endearing, often half-forgotten parts of our world. David Kuijer’s ‘Paints the Town’ gives us an unusually playful insight into the vibrant life of Cape Town, while Akware Elnah from Nairobi is exhibiting her work in the gallery for the first time.

All of this points to a particular strength of printmaking, which Erasmus of Rotterdam, a precursor of the Enlightenment, already recognised when he discussed the exchange of prints with his friends and patrons: it is ideally suited to the development and dissemination of new ideas.